Wow, not since people grossly misinterpreted last June's infamous "AtAT is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of MSN" satire have we endured such an avalanche of mail; the next day we had to issue a "just a joke, folks!" explanation just to keep our mail server from exploding, but this time around the mailbombing isn't even our fault. Blame it on Mac OS Rumors, whose sudden "disappearance" from the 'net prompted eleventy-kajillion people to ask us what happened, for some reason. Heck, folks, maybe you have this mental image of the MOSR staff and the AtAT staff getting together for pancakes and beach volleyball once a week, but the truth is, we don't know them and they don't know us. There's no Mac Web Illuminati, no consortium of web site proprietors who make up secret handshakes and plot to take over the world. (Yet. Or if there is, no one invited us.) So when http://www.macosrumors.com/ started spitting out "unable to locate host" errors, we were just as puzzled as you.

Perhaps people are emailing us about MOSR in hopes that we'll bring back the old "Apple's ninjas sabotaging Mac web sites" plot twist. Ha! Forget it, kids; we learned our lesson on that one when we had to issue another retraction once AtAT fans started bombarding the owners of MOSR and Reality (now AppleInsider) with mail asking if Apple really did force the sites to shut down. (We're pretty sure that was, in fact, our first retraction. Ahhh, memories...)

Anyway, just to stem the tidal wave of email that threatens to overwhelm us, we took it upon ourselves to do a little digging. First stop? The public WHOIS server at Network Solutions, those domain name registration guys. A quick check on "macosrumors.com" yields some pretty informative results: "Record expires on 16-Jul-2000." Now, we may not know what day it is half the time, but we're pretty sure that we know what month we're in. (October, right?) So basically, the problem over at Mac OS Rumors would seem to be a simple matter of either nonpayment of the registration fee, or a paperwork screw-up at Network Solutions. If we had to guess, we'd choose the former, since we recall MOSR's "parent company" Black Light Media recently announcing that it was selling off several of its domain names; sounds like those folks are shedding some dead weight.

In any case, mosr.com is still active, and won't expire until at least this November, so Mac OS Rumors is actually still alive and serving up the dirt. Curiously enough, the following message appears at the site: "Some readers, including some of the contributing writers, appear to be experiencing problems with the macosrumors.com domain. MOSR.com continues to work, and we are investigating the problem." Ah, so it wasn't an intentional move to drop the longer domain name. "The DNS servers are unaltered and appear to continue to be correctly configured, suggesting a problem elsewhere in the DNS system; any debugging data or insights into what may be wrong would be very much appreciated..." Pssst... Hey, guys... WHOIS is your friend. Hope you kept the cancelled check.