Have you noticed a distinctly... military feel coming from Apple in the last couple of weeks? First there's the nifty new commercial for the Power Macintosh G4, in which tanks surround one of Apple's speed-demons to protect it from the potential onslaught of vicious foreign invaders eager to get their hands on gigaflop performance. Then there's the news, first forwarded to us by a certain slumbering reptile who shall otherwise remain unidentified, that the U.S. Army is fed up with hackers compromising their security and hacking their web site-- so they're switching to a "more secure platform." Guess what that platform is (and no smart-aleck remarks from you old-timers about Omega's COS).

That's right, the Army's web site is now served by honest-to-goodness Macs. If you want to see for yourself, head over to Brad's Web Detective and enter http://www.army.mil/ as the URL. Sure enough, the Army's running WebSTAR, a Mac-only product-- and, incidentally, the AtAT staff's server software of choice. (That's about the only thing we have in common with the Army, probably.) As it turns out, the Mac OS is a very secure platform for web serving, since the Mac OS currently lacks any sort of native remote login capability. You can read more about the Army's recent hacker troubles and their "Think Different" solution in an ArmyLINK News article. We have to say, the whole idea of the Army "thinking different" tickles our collective irony bone.

Now if only some other branches of the military would follow suit, maybe they'd all be a little less grim. Remember a while back when the Navy had that little problem with Windows NT? A divide-by-zero error left a Navy "Smart Ship" dead in the water for a few hours, and it had to be towed back to shore. Perhaps seeing the Army migrate its web servers from Windows to the Mac OS will prompt further changes. If so, then everything will proceed according to plan. What plan, you ask? Surely you're not naïve enough to think Steve Jobs is innocent in all of this, right? We figure the hackers that messed with the Army web site are on his private payroll-- what better way to nudge the Army in the Mac's direction than to stage a web site break-in? Once he manages to infiltrate the U.S. military system with enough Macs, that's when the world domination plans get put into action. G4s at the ready, men!