Man, Captain Steve sure has his covert black-ops ninja sabotage team working overtime these days. Regular viewers are no doubt all too familiar with AtAT's seemingly futile struggle to maintain a steady broadcast signal over the past few weeks, and judging by the contents of our inbox, more than a few conspiracy-minded viewers are looking askance at the sudden vaporization of Mac OS Rumors about a week ago, as well. Consider the timing, if you will: AtAT suffered its most recent outage in the wee hours of last Friday morning, and service was restored at about 10:15 AM EDT. According to MacSurfer's archives, mere hours after we made bail on our last stint in Dead Air Jail, MOSR landed in the klink. Coincidenza?

Whereas our dead air has ostensibly been due to phone company incompetence (an eminently believable cover story-- we have to hand it to the forces that conspire against us), MOSR's downtime appears to have been due to a problematic server upgrade coupled with domain name registration troubles. The site did come back up briefly on Monday at a raw IP address-- but then vanished again so quickly, we didn't even have a chance to load the page. (Interestingly enough, it contained some dirt on the new hardware that Apple is expected to unveil at the May 1st event that's got the whole community abuzz. We find that fact rather... noteworthy.) And then when MOSR finally resurfaced yesterday afternoon, it was less than twelve hours before AtAT was once again plunged into the inky blackness of the void. Again, how about that timing? It's almost like Steve laid off the whole ninja sabotage team and is now doing all the black ops rumor-scuttling on his own, in classic micromanagement fashion.

And so currently we find ourselves in the brief interval between Steve severing our line and flying back to MOSR in his private jet armed with a pair of wirecutters and a blowtorch. Therefore, while we're down and MOSR is up, we should probably echo the juiciest tidbits from their latest Mayday report in our own production-- in preparation for the next inevitable downtime flip-flop. Here's the gist: according to MOSR, new iBooks and multiprocessor Power Macs are "almost certain" (though the site's details on the revamped iBook are somewhat at odds with what Go2Mac has proposed; MOSR refers to a "larger display," for one thing). Mac OS X Server 2.0 is also rumored to be ready for a May 1st intro, and a long-awaited announcement of the whole Apple retail stores plan is slated as "less certain" but still a possibility.

Nothing too earth-shattering, as far as we can make out, but hey, evidently Steve thought it was important enough to go crawling through the brambles at midnight with black paint on his face and a portable degaussing machine in his teeth. We notice that AppleInsider is uncharacteristically silent on the Mayday shindig; perhaps they're playing it safe until they're sure that Steve is out of wire-snipping range.