Ooooh, there's nothing like a little espionage to brighten up the week! Turn off your shoe phones and activate the Cone of Silence, because top secret spy photos of next week's new Power Macs have leaked out onto the 'net; faithful viewer and field operative Seth H. Nielsen sent us a coded message pointing to MacOSX.org, where the juicy nuggets of forbidden info are currently safehoused. If your security clearance is acceptably high and you don't mind fighting the rest of the world to tackle an overloaded server, take a peek and see what you think.

Good spies are skeptics at heart (the gullible ones get weeded out early by simple enemy traps like the old "gelignite cruller" trick), so we're not surprised to hear that, despite MacOSX.org's vehement assertions that these snaps are "100% accurate," several operatives aren't so sure. We did notice, of course, that the four photographs provided are rather lo-res-- was that the highest quality available in the spy-gear pinky-ring camera used to sneak these shots, or is the heavy JPEG compression intended to conceal signs of digital Photoshop shenanigans? Oh, the decisions a spy must make...

We've submitted the alleged photos to the white-coats down in the lab, and their super-high-tech tests, while inconclusive, lean slightly towards the "legit" side of the fence. Our own gut feeling is that they are real, though that may just be because they align so closely with the Naked Mole Rat's description of the new G4's "redesigned front panel" with "curvaceous new drive bays and a bodacious new speaker." Of course, any halfway-decent counterintelligence photo-doctoring operative would also have been aware of Agent Rat's recon on the systems, so that's not exactly a clincher. Still, our current opinion is that these pics are actual snapshots of next week's Power Macs.

If that indeed turns out to be so, then you can count on one thing: Apple's lawyers are going to be crawling all over MacOSX.org within the next few hours, poking at the proprietors with sharp sticks. We suppose the ultimate litmus test for authenticity is going to be whether or not the pictures are still available later tonight; remember when those "Kihei" photos leaked? Every site who dared to publish the images was smacked down by Apple Legal posthaste. Of course, that only confirmed that the photos were real, so maybe this time around Apple will play it sneaky and ignore the images completely. All we know for sure is, as of broadcast time, the pictures are still up...