Concerns emerge over iTunes user data
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Apple Inc.'s recent rollout of songs without copy protection software at its iTunes Store has given consumers new flexibility, but questions have emerged over the company's inclusion of personal data in purchased music tracks.
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Continuing the thread from yesterday. I got absolutely nowhere, some people suggested I use a smart playlist, missing the point that I'm a developer working on a podcatcher, not a user trying to use iTunes as a podcatcher. I'm sure it's an excellent way to subscribe to podcasts, but I have my own ideas how podcatchers should work, and I want to integrate them with other stuff I'm working on. Integrating with iTunes is proving to be quite a challenge, or maybe it's an art, we'll see.  As usual Mac users are superior sumbitches.  (Quoting the James Brolin character the first time we meet him in the third season finale of The West Wing.) Anyway, the search continues, I tried another more direct tack, and looked for glue for iTunes for UserLand, and bingo, there's a match, from 2001, a well-known Frontier programmer Sean Elfstrom, apparently converted glue for the Sonic SoundJam app that iTunes used to be, before Apple acquired it.  I installed the glue in the OPML Editor. It's daunting, for sure, but let's see what I can get working.
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The Mac Observer has confirmed through testing that the recently recently announced iTunes 4.7 release disables iPod Download, a plug-in to iTunes that allowed
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A BRITISH consumer has complained to government regulators about the cost of downloading music from Apple&#39;s iTunes Music Store.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is criticizing Apple over its practice of encrypting user data into purchased tracks from its iTunes music store, saying it poses a security risk to its users.
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Security researchers are warning of a serious - and unfixed - security hole with the popular Winamp media player.
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Users of Adobe's programs are taking issue with an apparent feature within the company's products that is sending out some type of data to an outside service.
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Steve Jobs writes, âWith the stunning global success of Appleâs iPod music player and iTunes online music store, some have called for Apple to âopenâ the digital rights management (DRM) system that Apple uses to protect its music against theft, so that music purchased from iTunes can be played on digital devices purchased from other companies, and protected music purchased from other online music stores can play on iPods. Letâs examine the current situation and how we got here, then look at three possible alternatives for the future.â
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When it releases the iPhone software development kit later this month, Apple will likely use iTunes as the means of distributing third-party software. That has programmers excited, because of iTunes' massive audience -- but also nervous about the amount of control Apple will have.
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A good tag editor can make managing your crazy-huge song collection a snap -- and free you from the world of iTunes ubiquity. By Eric Solomon.
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Thousands of credit card numbers and other personal data may have been compromised.
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With Apple releasing threats of 'bricked' iPhones and Amazon debuting its new music download service, Don Reisinger can't help but wonder if Apple is heading down a slippery slope.
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Music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 150 million songs from the iTunes Music Store, marking another major milestone for the online music business. iTunes users are now downloading more than 4 million songs per week, a rate of over 200 million songs per year. [Oct 14]
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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- Apple Inc.  said it launched iTunes  Plus, a digital rights management-free music download service,  for $1.29 per song.
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By Tony Glover, The Business, London  Sep. 10--Portable music players, such as the Apple range of iPods and the  other MP3 players sold by Philips and Sony are ticking timebombs from a  company security perspective.
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While there currently are no specific iPhone security threats, a researcher says that there are several security concerns that could lead to trouble.