The Department of Justice sure is one busy little beehive, at least when it comes to investigating Microsoft's alleged anticompetitive practices. Ever since the original "Redmond Justice" case flared up last year, the DoJ has kept digging and digging to uncover more evidence of Microsoft's business tomfoolery. As of yet, they've been successful in 1) modifying the distribution requirements on an operating system that is now no longer sold, and 2) sending Microsoft's stock price to new record highs. Given the Abbott and Costello feel of the whole ongoing investigation, we at AtAT are starting to wonder if it isn't Microsoft themselves pushing the DoJ inquiries. Still, we're grateful to the DoJ for giving us plot fodder for months on end (and very possibly years to come), even though their exploits have turned out to be more slapstick comedy than courtroom drama.

But speaking of plot fodder, the whole Mac-using Microsoft-watching world now has new reason to celebrate, because the latest plot twist in the DoJ's ongoing mission directly involves our hero Apple. Whereas so far Apple has only sat on the sidelines of the whole affair, now the DoJ is investigating Microsoft's alleged attempts to get Apple to bow out of the Windows multimedia software picture in exchange for "software favors." According to a CNNfn article, apparently the proposed deal was something like this: If Apple would keep future versions of Quicktime technology off of the Windows platform, Microsoft would stand behind "Apple software tools--" which could mean any number of things, but none of them are particularly flattering to Microsoft. This kind of deal has allegedly been offered several times over the past few years, with the last such indecent proposal occurring only four short months ago. Smartly, Apple has always declined Microsoft's offers, as the release of Quicktime 3 for Windows attests. However, Microsoft may have gotten even more underhanded in response; it seems that "onscreen error messages or other technical incompatibilities" in Windows may have been deliberately introduced to dissuade end users from installing Quicktime, and that Microsoft may also have used its considering muscle on Wintel manufacturers to prevent them from loading Quicktime onto their customer systems.

The DoJ apparently plans to add evidence of this attempted bribery and racketeering to its huge pile of "bad stuff Microsoft may have done," Given how much activity seems to center around Microsoft, perhaps we should consider creating a new Department of Microsoft Investigation. Or, to avoid further taxpayer expense, we could just rename the existing DoJ, given that it seems almost 90% of its time is spent gathering evidence of Microsoft's shadiness anyway. Then we taxpayers would only have to foot the bill for new stationery and business cards.

The folks hanging around the AtAT office aren't particularly fond of most award shows. Sure, beauty pageants are always a hoot and a holler, especially when everyone clustered around the TV arrives at the conclusion that none of the entrants is particularly engaging. Most MTV awards shows are entertaining in a garish, "Beavis and Butthead" sort of sensibility. And the Oscars are always a must-see, if only to check out what everyone's wearing. Other than those, though, we tend to steer clear; none of the others can really capture and hold our ridiculously short attention spans.

However, we just may have to tune in to this year's Emmy awards in September, because TBWA Chiat/Day (Steve Jobs' "ad agency of choice") has just been nominated in the "outstanding commercial" category for its "Think Different" ad. There are more details over at MacCentral. We weren't even aware that there were Emmys for commercials-- which shows you just how much we know about this stuff-- but we're very pleased that "Think Different" has been nominated.

The interesting thing we've noticed about the original sixty-second "Think Different" spot is just how much it grows on people. When we first saw it, our reaction was pretty much, "That's all?" After all, it was the first real Apple commercial in years, and it was made by the same superstars who crafted Apple's "1984" commercial to introduce the Macintosh. A bunch of grainy stock footage of "crazy people" hardly seemed up to snuff. Indeed, AtAT viewers ranked the commercial a B- on average (2.36 out of 5), with most of the positive feedback about it being, "well, at least it's an Apple commercial!" In fact, 23% of respondents actually felt that the commercial would hurt Apple instead of helping. But now, every time we see the thing, we're amazed at just how much it touches us, because it's true-- in general, those who choose Macintosh are choosing quality over mediocrity, at a time when mediocrity is staggeringly widespread. And while we can't speak for the rest of the Mac-using community, we're perfectly happy (and yes, even proud) to be among the crazy ones. Good luck to Chiat/Day!

Okay, this one's just plain weird... Faithful viewer Kellie made us aware of a strange URL: <http://women.are.evil.and.icky.net/>. That alone is weird enough. But what freaks us out is that if you follow the link, you don't end up at one of the thousands of screwball misogynistic feminist-bashing "Hillary Clinton just needs a real man"-type sites on the 'net. Instead, you find yourself staring at something much more sinister and frightening.

That's right; for some bizarre reason, <http://women.are.evil.and.icky.net/> jumps you over to the information page for the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. We found that just a little bit too strange to ignore, so we decided to see who had registered the "icky.net" domain name. The InterNIC whois lookup reveals that the owner of "icky.net" is some unknown entity known as "The Winc Group" from Old Hickory, Tennessee. An Alta Vista search on the phrase "winc group" reveals a handful of pages on another server, <http://www.the.oilers.nickname.is.icky.net/>. It's simply a source of information about "Tennessee's NFL team." Curiouser and curiouser.

The construction of an appropriate conspiracy theory is left as an exercise for the viewer. C'mon, this one's easy; we can't do everything for you people, ya know. Look at the basic elements: you've got your Microsoft, your unrelated and slightly offensive URL, and your standard mysterious third party consortium standing behind the grassy knoll and registering domain names with the InterNIC. How can you go wrong?