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Media (Apple)

Submission + - Is Apple making bank on undelivered iTunes songs?

Submitted by
kingpetey
kingpetey writes: "Ever give an iTunes song as a gift? The folks at this blog did an experiment where they sent 20 songs (K-Fed, which is hilarious in itself) to different contacts and tracked how many made it successfully. A few failed, but Apple didn't notify them of the failure. If it happened to me, I'd be — how you say — royally pissed. They describe the experiment here:

So what happened to the 20 songs we gifted? iTunes had a twenty-five percent failure rate: fifteen of the gifted songs arrived while five never made it. However, Apple took the full price each of the 20 songs without alerting us about the failed deliveries: no refund, no second try, nothing.
...
This little experiment begs the question, how much money is Apple making on undelivered music? Let's say that only two percent of the one billion songs downloaded last year were "gifted" songs, that would add up to two million songs. Now, that's hardly a drop in Apple's bucket of revenue, but if a twenty-five percent failure rate is the norm, then 500,000 songs go undelivered while Apple makes around $495,000 for failing to deliver songs.
The full article is at http://www.simpletechnology.net/is-apple-making-ba nk-on-undelivered-itunes-songs"
Music

Submission + - Ars Technica rebuts Jobs claim about DRM security

Submitted by twbecker
twbecker writes: Ken Fisher at Ars Technica agrees that DRM is bad for business. But in this article, he questions Steve Jobs' claim that licensing it's DRM to other companies would make it less secure. Fisher compares iTunes Fairplay to Microsoft's WMA, and does a fair job of rebutting Jobs' assertion. Is Jobs being sincere about his concerns regarding licensing Fairplay, or is he using it as an excuse to perpetuate a lock-in strategy?
Security

Submission + - University professor chastised for using Tor

Submitted by
Irongeek_ADC
Irongeek_ADC writes: "As reported in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, University IT "professionals" came knocking on Professor Censarini's door asking about why he was using the Tor network. While there they also asked that he not teach his students about it, and said it was likely against university policy. An interesting read that goes to show even Universities are turning big brother."
Yahoo!

Submission + - Pipes from Yahoo

Submitted by
ahab_2001
ahab_2001 writes: "Yahoo has apparently introduced a new product, called Pipes, that seems to be a sort of GUI-based interface for building applications that aggregate RSS feeds, creating Web-based applications from various sources, and publishing those applications. Sounds very cool — though the site's down at the moment; there's a decent write-up here. Has anybody tried this?"
Security

Submission + - U.S. cyber counterattack: Bomb 'em

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "If the United States found itself under a major cyberattack aimed at undermining the nation's critical information infrastructure, the Department of Defense is prepared, based on the authority of the president, to launch a cyber counterattack or an actual bombing of an attack source. All the military services are preparing for military cyber-response. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/020807-rsa-c yber-attacks.html"
Security

Submission + - Security 'Experts' Aren't So Secure At RSA Confere

Submitted by digihome
digihome writes: from the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do department For a group of people who should know better, attendees at the RSA Conference aren't following the advice they give their customers, co-workers, and friends. Wireless monitoring company AirDefense ran a scan on wireless devices at the conference. Of the 347 laptops, smartphones and hand-held devices, more than half weren't secure. http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=197 004158
The Internet

Submission + - Media companies presume guilt on Bittorrent

Submitted by
kripkenstein
kripkenstein writes: "The big media companies immediately assume you are guilty by your mere presence on a Bittorrent swarm, an interesting report reveals. Turns out companies like BayTSP will send shutdown notices to ISPs without any evidence of copyright infringment; all they feel they need in the form of evidence is that you are reported by the tracker to be in the swarm. As the report states,

For my investigation, I wrote a very simple BitTorrent client. My client sent a request to the tracker, and generally acted like a normal Bittorrent client up to sharing files. The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law. [...] With just this, completely legal, BitTorrent client, I was able to get notices from BayTSP.

To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs.
The report also has other interesting details about how companies like BayTSP operate."
The Internet

Submission + - Why Rich Internet Applications Use AJAX, Not Java

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It looks like Bruce Eckel has done it again. No sooner did he write about the departure of the "Java hyper-enthusiasts," previously discussed here on Slashdot, than he now rubs salt in the wound by highlighting in AJAXWorld Magazine how and why Java missed its golden opportunity to become the language undergirding Rich Internet Applications. [From the article] "We must ask why Java applets haven't become ubiquitous on the internet as the client-side standard for RIAs....This is an especially poignant question because Gosling and team justified rushing Java out the door (thus casting in stone many poorly-considered decisions) so that it could enable the internet revolution. That's why the AWT and Applets were thrown in at the last second, reportedly taking a month from conception to completion."

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