There's no question that Steve Jobs has done a lot since taking the helm at Apple a year ago, and one of those accomplishments was to plug the leaks that made our favorite computer company look more like a sieve than an actual business. There was so much "sensitive information" coming out of Cupertino that the only people who didn't know what Apple was doing three months ahead of the game were some Apple managers themselves. Jobs changed all that, by instituting severe penalties for leaking top secret info and by ferreting out the biggest moles by feeding specific information to specific controlled groups and watching to see which info suddenly sprouted up on rumor-mongering web sites like, er, this one.

For a while the strategy seemed to be working fairly well. It wasn't until the surprise unveiling of the iMac-- which nobody seemed to have seen coming-- that we all saw just how well Apple could keep a secret, if they tried really hard. The tables may be turning again, though, as Mac the Knife reports that Apple top brass are hopping mad about the copious Yosemite information hitting the 'net recently. Yosemite, you've likely already heard, is the codename for Apple's next-generation pro-level Power Macs-- not the speed-bumped G3's due in a few weeks, but a whole new beast expected late this year or early next, and rumored to include a slew of tasty features, such as G4 processors on a 100 MHz bus, AGP graphics ports, and built-in USB and FireWire. If what the Knife says is correct, Apple's upset enough about the leaks to have gone and sacked a whole set of contractors who were said to have been the moles.

Understandably, Apple's not thrilled about their extended product plans being as easy for the competition to obtain as the phone number for the local Domino's. Hopefully Apple's engineers aren't overly indiscriminate in what they whisper to outside forces-- or at least we hope that they're a model of discretion. The last thing Apple needs right now is a wild Jobsian firing rampage, leaving only a handful of ex-NeXT programmers and Shelby the janitor still on the payroll. (Especially since we hear that Shelby's got a big mouth-- buy him three beers and he'll tell you all about those weird, pulsating green minitowers churning away in Apple's labs.)