The mere fact that it should be fixed immediately does not at all mean that Apple MUST just quickly hack something together and just release it to the public.
Guess what, in theory, all computers SHOULD IMMEDIATELY be secure out of the box and never ever require any patch. But this is real life. not utopia.
I have yet to see a tested, reliable proposed patch for this vulnerability at the open-source darwin resources. My guess is it is far from being a trivial fix, and chances are Apple wants to thoroughly test it before releasing it.
All Carrel is doing is demanding a deadline that was different from what Apple told him. He could have very-well just waited another month before releasing his advisory. Chances of someone else finding out about it on their own *and* managing to slither their way onto vulnerable subnets, write and execute an exploit, all this within, say, at most 30 days from the day this story popped-up and the latest possible day in december, are fucking slim to none. It is also NOT like this vulnerability would allow a script writer to write a worm that could quickly spread to the internet. Sure, entire subnets could be affected at a time, but the exploit would remain WITHIN the subnet, spreading it out to other networks would require sending email viruses or other stupid PEBKAC-based annoyances. Oh and the victim machine has to be initiating a dhcp request for it to get owned, which typically only happens at boot/startup time, or connection/disconnection. I can see laptop on large corporate networks being vulnerable, but again, a malicious machine would have to make its way INSIDE the network: it needs to live within 802.11b/g range and/or local hub. The offending machine could very easily be traced and its owner hung by the balls.
Yes Apple reneged on their original deadline, chances are they had good reason and were trying to address that botched 10.2.8 release to have a stable base system to release another security patch on. As long as they communicate timeline information back to him, they clearly are NOT giving him the run-around. December is not unreasonable provided what we get is a stable, reliable fix. Confirming a vulnerability can be a far fucking cry from having a successful patch implemented and released, if the fix for the vulnerability is not trivial. For example, a mere buffer-overflow vulnerability in a piece of C code is typically a trivial fix. Revamping DHCP is not necessarily.
Does Carrel's advisory offer a code fix to the Darwin Core? NO it doesn't. Has the potential issue of rogue evil Netinfo servers been around for a while? YES IT HAS.
Some geeks should consider getting laid once in a while and resist the amazing trepidations of unleashing a juicy piece of information that'll quench a lifetime's worth karma-whoring lust.
no it is not already patched. I am running Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1), and the insecure website's proof-of-concept DOES show me ALL cookie stored in the.ebay.com domain.
... if you think newkid should not be using computers?
*raises hand*.
All articles newkid pointed out mentioned this "issue" as trivial and/or easily fixable, don't seem to be directly related, all appear to have been found by doing a google search for netinfo, and do not make his little issue a "well documented fact". I can also google for just about any type of computing issue and dig out hundreds of articles on any particular subject.
There are, furthermore, many ways one can corrupt a hard drive, that could affect just about any file on it, this holds true regardless of which platform you're on, and usually has to do with a filesystem's strength. I hear journaling, which becomes enabled in Panther, while lying dormant in Jaguar, tends to avert such file corruption issues. In any case periodic filesystem checks should always be run. Mac OS X knows to perform those at reboot time, when it's been a while since the last one. Servers are most likely a different story due to required uptime. This is why systems administrators who have a clue do plan downtime for such maintenance and health-monitoring tasks and have redundant systems to guarantee uptime.
Oh yeah and not allowing a root user to log-in remotely is hardly a bug or a flaw.
buy it used or new from Amazon at a discounted price. rip the CD to MP3 straight into you library. voila.
buy it from *another* online music store in MP3 format, drag it to your iTunes library.
It's easy to point fingers at Apple because they don't support the other cross-vendor DRM format which WMA. It would be just as easy for other vendors to support AAC, they choose not to. In the end you're choosing to get locked-in one DRM model vs another. I just look at selection, iTMS has the best selection at this time, it is slated to become even better as iTunes gains popularity on the PC platform.
In the end i know i can easily burn my entire digitally-purchased AAC music collection to regular audio CDs, alongside MP3s i already had, easily, transparently.
Also the Neuros has a separate attachment for the external hard drive. it's just too much to deal with for your average consumer. Most of what you mention says "well, for now, but later it will be better", well okay then, let's talk again when it *is* better.
Right now your iPod gives you everything. It is simple. it is very specifically scoped to perform a very specific set of tasks which Apple has carefully identified as what the market wants: play music, while still posessing a very nice set of "extra" features such as the ability to use your iPod as a firewire hard drive, that do not compromise *at all* the overall experience. You average user can look at the thing without thinking, and start using it right away.
iPod supports MP3s. it supports AACs. It is just an MP3 player like any other one, as far as formats go, okay it doesn't do OGG, big deal, both AAC and OGG are exact same in quality at high bitrates. Why do people always keep implying you HAVE to use iTMS for your iPod to be useful? NOT AT ALL. You don't HAVE to use iTMS with it. Just rip CDs, import music from friends, stick your whole kazaa collection in there, it works just fine.
And as far as legaly purchasing music ONLINE, guess what, there will ALWAYS, *A L W A Y S* be some sort of built-in DRM scheme. Absolutely NO ONLINE MUSIC STORE OUT THERE allows you to "purchase" digital music in MP3 format. NONE. ZERO. The Exception of course is independent online music marketplaces, stuff for which rights are looser, upcoming artists, great jazz bands, stuff sold on emusic.com. and that's fine. guess what you can purchase music from emusic.com and stick it on your iPod just fine, no problem there, it's MP3, iPod is happy with it.
So really, when purchasing online music in digital format, it's a matter of choosing which close, proprietary DRM scheme you want to lock yourself in, and what it is you want to do with your music after you purchase it. Many DRM schemes out there for the PC only allow you to rent the music vs purchase it. You lose your rights to play your music once you cancel your monthly subscription. I'm sorry but being able to download 100,000 songs to my hard drive but having to pay $8/month for the rest of my life to be able to listen to it just ain't an option to me. iTunes lets me burn music purchased online to regular audio CDs AS MUCH AS I WANT. I can pick a stack of 100 blanks CDs for under $30 at Fry's, and that's without even trying to comparison-shop. I can build my own Albums based on music i have ripped from other CDs and music i have purchased on-line, and make nice compilation CDs for every possible mood so i can play them in my beemer in my one-hour commute to work.
If you don't support DRM, then it's simple, don't purchase music on-line and have your way on Kazaa, or support independent artists thru emusic.com.
i've got a second-generation 10GB model and i regularly jog by the water on the beach while dodging incoming waves between Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach piers and back (roughly 5 miles), while having the iPod strapped on my right arm using one of those nifty neoprene holders and it has never ever skipped.
install X11 on OS X. This is just Apple's version, there's also the XonX project. I'd recommend Apple's version for now. If you have Panther, it is located on CD #3, there's an X11.pkg file, dlb-click on that, or you may tell the panther installer to install it for you if you check the appropriate box in a "Customize..." Install.
from this point, just about any unix/linux/open-source app you can think of is available to you to run under OS X, either from any terminal, or thru X11. For a while and since Mac OS 10.1, i've had a slew of X11 apps running on my mac, the whole Gnome desktop and all its goodies, and Gimp, to name a few.
actually EarthLink's spyware blocker does a pretty damn good job at blocking adware. it's powered by WebRoot. but of course, you gotta be an active earthlink member to use it... i'm a member but i'm on macos x so i don't use it much. i have played with it under VirtualPC along with the rest of their Total Access 2004 suite just for kicks and to know if i could recommend the whole thing to my windows-using sisters. i can honnestly say i was impressed and i *want* them to use it so they fscking stop calling me for support. I think EarthLink is the first ISP out there to have put out a very decent non-intrusive internet software package for windows users: the bulk of the software manifests itself as a minizable, repositionable, closable "toolbar" and an icon in the tray. It clearly is a departure from their older "all-inclusive-sandbox" approach of the "earthlink 5.0" days.
i've been an earthlink user for quite a few years now and i usually tend to stay away from ISP-supplied software, but they have been putting out some pretty cool shit this year thru various 3rd-party software partnerships/cobrandizing, the latest of which being SpyWare Blocker powered by WebRoot. it is actually quite cool: it'll look for advertising companies cookies and disable'em for you, as well as offer you to remove 3rd-party spyware and trojans, i think it can do some other shit but i haven't entirely explored it yet. it maintains a constantly updated database of existing spyware. i wonder if it would catch the New.net shit. hrmzerz. and it's free for all earthlink customers.
ok ok u guys need to chill out. just because google goes IPO does not mean they have to give a shit about their stock price. After all, they do make plenty of money on their own, what they get on the stock market will be nice gravy. They could very easily tell investors "this is our vision, take it or leave it, if you don't like it, u may suck our collective cocks".
hardly a pittance when this music is actually being *paid for*, *and* considering there has been close to zero true marketing promotion for the online store. this all pure word of mouth. Wait until the AOL/PEPSI deal gets implemented and this thing is available to the AOL public at large. The cost ain't trivial, especially considering Apple still isn't getting most of the money made on the online store, most of it goes to the record labels, read their 10Q. it might cover costs at best. iTMS and iTunes clearly are iPod-sellers.
Yup, and your bandwidth calculations don't even take into account the amount of times users "preview" a song before actually downloading the purchased version. That costs bandwidth too.
Heh. I also like how the parent claims there won't be a market explosion. Excuse me but the market explosion has already started. iTMS has been getting tremendous press coverage, and that is without the deal with AOL and PEPSI having been implemented YET. And you can bet your sweet ass record labels are all going to get behind Apple to promote the iTMS, because iTMS is their last hope for a viable online commercial music business model that satisfies all parties. Since iTunes came out for the PC, 5 co-workers of mine have already bought iPods.
1 million purchases from PC users alone in 3.5 days. Yeah. clearly no demand for Apple's offering.
The fact is, once you buy music over iTunes, it *IS*, indeed YOURS. You are dismissing far too quickly the fact that you can burn it onto a CD and play it onto an unrestricted amount of devices. Many other "unlimited" services out there have DRM built-in stuff you download from them, but you can only play your music as long as you pay the monthly fee to listen to it. Apple lets you actually OWN it. And yes you can play your music on as many computers as you want, just not an infinite number of computers simultaneously. It does make perfect sense. Nobody controlls your iTMS-purchased music. It merely attempts to duplicate in a digital format hoops you would normally have to jump thru in the past to copy music you owned onto another medium, without the loss of quality. The only people this DRM model hurts are people who want to freely distribute their commercial (not freeware, not shareware) music to people who didn't pay for it.
Unrestricted digital music formats simply cannot live as "for sale music". Such formats will always either apply to free, shareware (a-la Magnatune), or pirated music. THAT is the issue. Now, don't blame Apple for being the first company to bring the world (well, the U.S. in practicallity) the first and only online store to offer a business model that mostly sastisfies all parties involved, in a very friendly, convenient interface. If music is to legally be sold in a digital format, that digital format NEEDS to have some sort of digital rights management. I challenge you to prove otherwise. If you want to blame somebody, then blame your favorite artists for going to big record labels in the first place, versus recording music on their own and making their music available for free on the internet as mp3's. Blaming Apple is non-sensical. Apple has managed to curb the record labels' hegemony and make it play nice with the consumers. Not only that, but Apple's online store ALSO allows independent, smaller record labels (such as CDBABY) to play with the big guys, and Apple has even dedicated an entire portion of their online music store to surface indie music and raise awareness to it.
Now if you stop and think about it, this is HUGE for indie music: It works this way: Big record labels promote their own music big time via the big AOL and PEPSI hooplah, and tell everyone to go buy music from the online music store. You suddenly get hoardes of average joe-blow consumers looking at the iTMS and wondering... OoOOoo, what's that "indie music" thingamadoodle? Gee lemma check it out.
I like the principle behind Magnatune, i think it is valiant and worthy effort which definitely shows what the Internet is all about. But face it, artists that want to make it big-time (and i do mean BIG) NEED record labels. why? because it's a whole package: Record labels get your music PROMOTED. Until your music is promoted, it ain't worth shit. It's sad, it's infuriating, but it's true. Because right now people spend more time in front of the TV, listening to the radio, going to the movies, walking and driving the streets while passing hundreds of billboards, all of this courtesy of ClearChannel, than surfing the web for cool, original, worthy artists that are different from what the mass media shoves at our face.
There is a market for indie music, but the largest market still remains popular music owned by record labels. Apple will allow the first one to grow, and enable consumers to get what they want from the second one.
yup, the france unemployment figures are further faked out by who they do not count in the statistics, and every year, as france gets closer to 13-15% unemployment rate, they keep excluding more and more groups of people from unemployment statistics, to keeep social unrest at bay and put a pretty-face on the situation. A typical trick is for the french government to create government-subsidised "training" and "formation" programs, as well as "extended postgraduate curriculums" to basically keep kids in school for as long as they possibly can and out of the unemployment statistics. When i refer to "kids", i'm talking about 24-30 year-olds who still live with their parents, as the economy is THAT bad. France has for a long-time suffered in this self-feeding vicious circles where governmental policies cause companies to not hire, thereby increasing unemployment rate, which the government tries to remedy to by further taxing employment-generating companies.
decades of corrupted socialist governments have basically drowned france into this deep, lingering recession which it has never really come out of, and Chirac is facing quite an uphill battle to fix this mess.
Strong socialist governments medling into affairs of businesses is one of the main reasons why Arnold Schwarzenegger has fled Europe and become a Republican American. He has seen how detrimental to a nation's economy can be the excessive government involvment in business regulation, which is essentially the main platform of a socialist government: "don't let those evil companies abuse and exploit workers and do whatever it takes to keep workers happy, even if it means they don't have to work that hard, or at all for that matter, pass laws that will make workers feel comfortable about their social standing and keep re-electing our socialist government". Such policies have led to a tremendous abuse of the social system, whereby many prospective milk the crap out of their very very NICE unemployment allowances.
While i believe most socialist ideals are invaluable on paper, and have definitely helped France put an end to social abuses by larger companies from the early 20th century, a sense of level-headedness has been lost somewhere in the process, causing many laws to have been passed in France that effectively scare employment-generating businesses away from hiring within the country, and farm out everything they possibly can.
All this dismissal FUD directed at iTunes and Apple kinda reminds me of the way microsoft used to dismiss linux and the whole open-source community. How long before we see some interesting internal memos being leaked, outlining microsoft's "plan of action" against iTunes to preserve the windows media hegemony.
hear hear. I can vouch for mac stuff working first time, every time. take a peek at a couple of my journal entries that outline my experience migrating from a dell laptop to the first-generation 400Mhz Titanium powerbook.
My work has just upgraded me to the latest 15" 1.25Ghz Aluminum Powerbook, which has also qualified me for the up-to-date program so i can get Panther for 10.3. I'll soon be posting a "2-years later" follow-up journal entry to my original switch story. Apple software and hardware just keep giving, the introduction of Mac OS X was a major enabling pivotal point in Apple's history, and, i would say, a major milestone in overall computing history.
EarthLink installation has, for years, always configured everything you needed to use the internet, including installing its own email client and configuring it for your account(s). "EarthLink 5.x" was more of a sandbox paradigm. The new "Total Access" series (2003, 2004) adopt a far less intrusive "toolbar" approach, that keeps everything you need at your fingertibs in a toolbar conveniently positioned on the screen. TotalAccess 2004 also comes with its own e-mail client which is seemlessly integrated with EarthLink's latest spam-blocking features. In any case, from the moment you pop the CD into the computer until you are reading email and "surfing the 'Net", the whole experience is very, very easy.
The difference with AOL is that EarthLink does not require you to use their software to get on-line. If you know what you're doing, you could simply sign-up for a dial-up account online from, say, your work, at the end of which you'd get presented with a screen that gives you all the settings you need to set-it up yourself: mail server (POP/SMTP), news server, http/www address, ftp upload info, NNTP server and all that groovy stuff..
it basically gives you options. If you don't want to think, just pop the CD-in and you're done, if you don't want to use their software, config it yourself. easy.
Slashdot Mirror
The mere fact that it should be fixed immediately does not at all mean that Apple MUST just quickly hack something together and just release it to the public.
Guess what, in theory, all computers SHOULD IMMEDIATELY be secure out of the box and never ever require any patch. But this is real life. not utopia.
I have yet to see a tested, reliable proposed patch for this vulnerability at the open-source darwin resources. My guess is it is far from being a trivial fix, and chances are Apple wants to thoroughly test it before releasing it.
All Carrel is doing is demanding a deadline that was different from what Apple told him. He could have very-well just waited another month before releasing his advisory. Chances of someone else finding out about it on their own *and* managing to slither their way onto vulnerable subnets, write and execute an exploit, all this within, say, at most 30 days from the day this story popped-up and the latest possible day in december, are fucking slim to none. It is also NOT like this vulnerability would allow a script writer to write a worm that could quickly spread to the internet. Sure, entire subnets could be affected at a time, but the exploit would remain WITHIN the subnet, spreading it out to other networks would require sending email viruses or other stupid PEBKAC-based annoyances. Oh and the victim machine has to be initiating a dhcp request for it to get owned, which typically only happens at boot/startup time, or connection/disconnection. I can see laptop on large corporate networks being vulnerable, but again, a malicious machine would have to make its way INSIDE the network: it needs to live within 802.11b/g range and/or local hub. The offending machine could very easily be traced and its owner hung by the balls.
Yes Apple reneged on their original deadline, chances are they had good reason and were trying to address that botched 10.2.8 release to have a stable base system to release another security patch on. As long as they communicate timeline information back to him, they clearly are NOT giving him the run-around. December is not unreasonable provided what we get is a stable, reliable fix. Confirming a vulnerability can be a far fucking cry from having a successful patch implemented and released, if the fix for the vulnerability is not trivial. For example, a mere buffer-overflow vulnerability in a piece of C code is typically a trivial fix. Revamping DHCP is not necessarily.
Does Carrel's advisory offer a code fix to the Darwin Core? NO it doesn't. Has the potential issue of rogue evil Netinfo servers been around for a while? YES IT HAS.
Some geeks should consider getting laid once in a while and resist the amazing trepidations of unleashing a juicy piece of information that'll quench a lifetime's worth karma-whoring lust.
no it is not already patched. I am running Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1), and the insecure website's proof-of-concept DOES show me ALL cookie stored in the .ebay.com domain.
aaaah. God bless nakednews.com.
i'm guna sign up first chance i get.
*raises hand*.
All articles newkid pointed out mentioned this "issue" as trivial and/or easily fixable, don't seem to be directly related, all appear to have been found by doing a google search for netinfo, and do not make his little issue a "well documented fact". I can also google for just about any type of computing issue and dig out hundreds of articles on any particular subject.
There are, furthermore, many ways one can corrupt a hard drive, that could affect just about any file on it, this holds true regardless of which platform you're on, and usually has to do with a filesystem's strength. I hear journaling, which becomes enabled in Panther, while lying dormant in Jaguar, tends to avert such file corruption issues. In any case periodic filesystem checks should always be run. Mac OS X knows to perform those at reboot time, when it's been a while since the last one. Servers are most likely a different story due to required uptime. This is why systems administrators who have a clue do plan downtime for such maintenance and health-monitoring tasks and have redundant systems to guarantee uptime.
Oh yeah and not allowing a root user to log-in remotely is hardly a bug or a flaw.
the ad clearly states PERSONAL computer. Cray does not qualify.
It's easy to point fingers at Apple because they don't support the other cross-vendor DRM format which WMA. It would be just as easy for other vendors to support AAC, they choose not to. In the end you're choosing to get locked-in one DRM model vs another. I just look at selection, iTMS has the best selection at this time, it is slated to become even better as iTunes gains popularity on the PC platform.
In the end i know i can easily burn my entire digitally-purchased AAC music collection to regular audio CDs, alongside MP3s i already had, easily, transparently.
Also the Neuros has a separate attachment for the external hard drive. it's just too much to deal with for your average consumer. Most of what you mention says "well, for now, but later it will be better", well okay then, let's talk again when it *is* better.
Right now your iPod gives you everything. It is simple. it is very specifically scoped to perform a very specific set of tasks which Apple has carefully identified as what the market wants: play music, while still posessing a very nice set of "extra" features such as the ability to use your iPod as a firewire hard drive, that do not compromise *at all* the overall experience. You average user can look at the thing without thinking, and start using it right away.
iPod supports MP3s. it supports AACs. It is just an MP3 player like any other one, as far as formats go, okay it doesn't do OGG, big deal, both AAC and OGG are exact same in quality at high bitrates. Why do people always keep implying you HAVE to use iTMS for your iPod to be useful? NOT AT ALL. You don't HAVE to use iTMS with it. Just rip CDs, import music from friends, stick your whole kazaa collection in there, it works just fine.
And as far as legaly purchasing music ONLINE, guess what, there will ALWAYS, *A L W A Y S* be some sort of built-in DRM scheme. Absolutely NO ONLINE MUSIC STORE OUT THERE allows you to "purchase" digital music in MP3 format. NONE. ZERO. The Exception of course is independent online music marketplaces, stuff for which rights are looser, upcoming artists, great jazz bands, stuff sold on emusic.com. and that's fine. guess what you can purchase music from emusic.com and stick it on your iPod just fine, no problem there, it's MP3, iPod is happy with it.
So really, when purchasing online music in digital format, it's a matter of choosing which close, proprietary DRM scheme you want to lock yourself in, and what it is you want to do with your music after you purchase it. Many DRM schemes out there for the PC only allow you to rent the music vs purchase it. You lose your rights to play your music once you cancel your monthly subscription. I'm sorry but being able to download 100,000 songs to my hard drive but having to pay $8/month for the rest of my life to be able to listen to it just ain't an option to me. iTunes lets me burn music purchased online to regular audio CDs AS MUCH AS I WANT. I can pick a stack of 100 blanks CDs for under $30 at Fry's, and that's without even trying to comparison-shop. I can build my own Albums based on music i have ripped from other CDs and music i have purchased on-line, and make nice compilation CDs for every possible mood so i can play them in my beemer in my one-hour commute to work.
If you don't support DRM, then it's simple, don't purchase music on-line and have your way on Kazaa, or support independent artists thru emusic.com.
i've got a second-generation 10GB model and i regularly jog by the water on the beach while dodging incoming waves between Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach piers and back (roughly 5 miles), while having the iPod strapped on my right arm using one of those nifty neoprene holders and it has never ever skipped.
do people on these forums actually jog? i do.
please mod parent way up.
'tis insanely informative
i do. :-*
i would recommend you do 2 things:
from this point, just about any unix/linux/open-source app you can think of is available to you to run under OS X, either from any terminal, or thru X11. For a while and since Mac OS 10.1, i've had a slew of X11 apps running on my mac, the whole Gnome desktop and all its goodies, and Gimp, to name a few.
Enjoy :)
actually EarthLink's spyware blocker does a pretty damn good job at blocking adware. it's powered by WebRoot. but of course, you gotta be an active earthlink member to use it ... i'm a member but i'm on macos x so i don't use it much. i have played with it under VirtualPC along with the rest of their Total Access 2004 suite just for kicks and to know if i could recommend the whole thing to my windows-using sisters. i can honnestly say i was impressed and i *want* them to use it so they fscking stop calling me for support. I think EarthLink is the first ISP out there to have put out a very decent non-intrusive internet software package for windows users: the bulk of the software manifests itself as a minizable, repositionable, closable "toolbar" and an icon in the tray. It clearly is a departure from their older "all-inclusive-sandbox" approach of the "earthlink 5.0" days.
all ive gotta say is ...
my slashdot user id is smaller than yours!
ha!
i've been an earthlink user for quite a few years now and i usually tend to stay away from ISP-supplied software, but they have been putting out some pretty cool shit this year thru various 3rd-party software partnerships/cobrandizing, the latest of which being SpyWare Blocker powered by WebRoot. it is actually quite cool: it'll look for advertising companies cookies and disable'em for you, as well as offer you to remove 3rd-party spyware and trojans, i think it can do some other shit but i haven't entirely explored it yet. it maintains a constantly updated database of existing spyware. i wonder if it would catch the New.net shit. hrmzerz. and it's free for all earthlink customers.
ok ok u guys need to chill out. just because google goes IPO does not mean they have to give a shit about their stock price. After all, they do make plenty of money on their own, what they get on the stock market will be nice gravy. They could very easily tell investors "this is our vision, take it or leave it, if you don't like it, u may suck our collective cocks".
hardly a pittance when this music is actually being *paid for*, *and* considering there has been close to zero true marketing promotion for the online store. this all pure word of mouth. Wait until the AOL/PEPSI deal gets implemented and this thing is available to the AOL public at large. The cost ain't trivial, especially considering Apple still isn't getting most of the money made on the online store, most of it goes to the record labels, read their 10Q. it might cover costs at best. iTMS and iTunes clearly are iPod-sellers.
Yup, and your bandwidth calculations don't even take into account the amount of times users "preview" a song before actually downloading the purchased version. That costs bandwidth too.
Heh. I also like how the parent claims there won't be a market explosion. Excuse me but the market explosion has already started. iTMS has been getting tremendous press coverage, and that is without the deal with AOL and PEPSI having been implemented YET. And you can bet your sweet ass record labels are all going to get behind Apple to promote the iTMS, because iTMS is their last hope for a viable online commercial music business model that satisfies all parties. Since iTunes came out for the PC, 5 co-workers of mine have already bought iPods.
1 million purchases from PC users alone in 3.5 days. Yeah. clearly no demand for Apple's offering.
The fact is, once you buy music over iTunes, it *IS*, indeed YOURS. You are dismissing far too quickly the fact that you can burn it onto a CD and play it onto an unrestricted amount of devices. Many other "unlimited" services out there have DRM built-in stuff you download from them, but you can only play your music as long as you pay the monthly fee to listen to it. Apple lets you actually OWN it. And yes you can play your music on as many computers as you want, just not an infinite number of computers simultaneously. It does make perfect sense. Nobody controlls your iTMS-purchased music. It merely attempts to duplicate in a digital format hoops you would normally have to jump thru in the past to copy music you owned onto another medium, without the loss of quality. The only people this DRM model hurts are people who want to freely distribute their commercial (not freeware, not shareware) music to people who didn't pay for it.
Unrestricted digital music formats simply cannot live as "for sale music". Such formats will always either apply to free, shareware (a-la Magnatune), or pirated music. THAT is the issue. Now, don't blame Apple for being the first company to bring the world (well, the U.S. in practicallity) the first and only online store to offer a business model that mostly sastisfies all parties involved, in a very friendly, convenient interface. If music is to legally be sold in a digital format, that digital format NEEDS to have some sort of digital rights management. I challenge you to prove otherwise. If you want to blame somebody, then blame your favorite artists for going to big record labels in the first place, versus recording music on their own and making their music available for free on the internet as mp3's. Blaming Apple is non-sensical. Apple has managed to curb the record labels' hegemony and make it play nice with the consumers. Not only that, but Apple's online store ALSO allows independent, smaller record labels (such as CDBABY) to play with the big guys, and Apple has even dedicated an entire portion of their online music store to surface indie music and raise awareness to it.
Now if you stop and think about it, this is HUGE for indie music: It works this way: Big record labels promote their own music big time via the big AOL and PEPSI hooplah, and tell everyone to go buy music from the online music store. You suddenly get hoardes of average joe-blow consumers looking at the iTMS and wondering ... OoOOoo, what's that "indie music" thingamadoodle? Gee lemma check it out.
I like the principle behind Magnatune, i think it is valiant and worthy effort which definitely shows what the Internet is all about. But face it, artists that want to make it big-time (and i do mean BIG) NEED record labels. why? because it's a whole package: Record labels get your music PROMOTED. Until your music is promoted, it ain't worth shit. It's sad, it's infuriating, but it's true. Because right now people spend more time in front of the TV, listening to the radio, going to the movies, walking and driving the streets while passing hundreds of billboards, all of this courtesy of ClearChannel, than surfing the web for cool, original, worthy artists that are different from what the mass media shoves at our face.
There is a market for indie music, but the largest market still remains popular music owned by record labels. Apple will allow the first one to grow, and enable consumers to get what they want from the second one.
yup, the france unemployment figures are further faked out by who they do not count in the statistics, and every year, as france gets closer to 13-15% unemployment rate, they keep excluding more and more groups of people from unemployment statistics, to keeep social unrest at bay and put a pretty-face on the situation. A typical trick is for the french government to create government-subsidised "training" and "formation" programs, as well as "extended postgraduate curriculums" to basically keep kids in school for as long as they possibly can and out of the unemployment statistics. When i refer to "kids", i'm talking about 24-30 year-olds who still live with their parents, as the economy is THAT bad. France has for a long-time suffered in this self-feeding vicious circles where governmental policies cause companies to not hire, thereby increasing unemployment rate, which the government tries to remedy to by further taxing employment-generating companies.
decades of corrupted socialist governments have basically drowned france into this deep, lingering recession which it has never really come out of, and Chirac is facing quite an uphill battle to fix this mess.
Strong socialist governments medling into affairs of businesses is one of the main reasons why Arnold Schwarzenegger has fled Europe and become a Republican American. He has seen how detrimental to a nation's economy can be the excessive government involvment in business regulation, which is essentially the main platform of a socialist government: "don't let those evil companies abuse and exploit workers and do whatever it takes to keep workers happy, even if it means they don't have to work that hard, or at all for that matter, pass laws that will make workers feel comfortable about their social standing and keep re-electing our socialist government". Such policies have led to a tremendous abuse of the social system, whereby many prospective milk the crap out of their very very NICE unemployment allowances.
While i believe most socialist ideals are invaluable on paper, and have definitely helped France put an end to social abuses by larger companies from the early 20th century, a sense of level-headedness has been lost somewhere in the process, causing many laws to have been passed in France that effectively scare employment-generating businesses away from hiring within the country, and farm out everything they possibly can.
your remarks are absolutely dead-on.
All this dismissal FUD directed at iTunes and Apple kinda reminds me of the way microsoft used to dismiss linux and the whole open-source community. How long before we see some interesting internal memos being leaked, outlining microsoft's "plan of action" against iTunes to preserve the windows media hegemony.
hear hear. I can vouch for mac stuff working first time, every time. take a peek at a couple of my journal entries that outline my experience migrating from a dell laptop to the first-generation 400Mhz Titanium powerbook.
Two years later and a 384MB --> $200 1-GIG of RAM upgrade (courtesy of pricewatch) later, that little puppy is still kickin' ass and taking names.
My work has just upgraded me to the latest 15" 1.25Ghz Aluminum Powerbook, which has also qualified me for the up-to-date program so i can get Panther for 10.3. I'll soon be posting a "2-years later" follow-up journal entry to my original switch story. Apple software and hardware just keep giving, the introduction of Mac OS X was a major enabling pivotal point in Apple's history, and, i would say, a major milestone in overall computing history.
Best to you and your computing life :)
EarthLink installation has, for years, always configured everything you needed to use the internet, including installing its own email client and configuring it for your account(s). "EarthLink 5.x" was more of a sandbox paradigm. The new "Total Access" series (2003, 2004) adopt a far less intrusive "toolbar" approach, that keeps everything you need at your fingertibs in a toolbar conveniently positioned on the screen. TotalAccess 2004 also comes with its own e-mail client which is seemlessly integrated with EarthLink's latest spam-blocking features. In any case, from the moment you pop the CD into the computer until you are reading email and "surfing the 'Net", the whole experience is very, very easy.
The difference with AOL is that EarthLink does not require you to use their software to get on-line. If you know what you're doing, you could simply sign-up for a dial-up account online from, say, your work, at the end of which you'd get presented with a screen that gives you all the settings you need to set-it up yourself: mail server (POP/SMTP), news server, http/www address, ftp upload info, NNTP server and all that groovy stuff..
it basically gives you options. If you don't want to think, just pop the CD-in and you're done, if you don't want to use their software, config it yourself. easy.