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September 16, 2003 |
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Who's afraid of the big bad RIAA? Most of us, now that the group is suing 261 alleged file traders, including a 12-year-old girl. We give you the update on what's next for the accused. Plus, we look at whether the bigger iPods are really all that much better. |
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RIAA
The recording industry's battle against file trading turned into a war zone littered with casualties last week as the RIAA dropped its payload of 261 lawsuits against alleged file swappers, charging them with "egregious" copyright infringement. Caught in the cross fire was 12-year-old Brianna Lahara, a reported honor student who lives with her single mother in New York public housing. The RIAA settled with Brianna's mother for $2,000, a sum that the group says was "considerably lower" than other settlements. How kind! Of course, Brianna's case quickly became a cause célèbre for RIAA critics, some of whom even offered to put up the $2,000 on Brianna's behalf. And who could blame them? It's a plum ripe for the picking, and it boldly shows the PR nightmare these suits could become. Now, a federal appeals court is scrutinizing the original court decision that gave the RIAA permission to subpoena ISPs for usernames, which started this whole mess in the first place. If that decision is overturned, none of these suits would have any basis. In the meantime, stay on the legal side of digital music online by checking out one of our top-rated legal music services. |
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iPod
In the world of MP3 players, companies have learned that you have to keep up with the Joneses--by Joneses, I mean Apple. And last week, Apple upped the ante again for those would-be players by increasing the capacity of its two iPods from 10GB and 30GB to 20GB and 40GB--for the same price as the previous models. This news definitely makes things more interesting for competitors such as Philips, iRiver, Rio, and Creative, who are all coming out with their own next-generation jukeboxes. Some sport a superslim, pocketable design, while others are brimming with cutting-edge features. What will be the hottest gadget coming for the holidays? We'll see; but if it's not the iPod, we expect Apple will come out with something else to put the company on top of the pile. |
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Internet Explorer
Microsoft security flaws seem as plentiful as California gubernatorial candidates these days, and last week brought a new one. This time, the software giant found three vulnerabilities in Windows that could have a similar effect to that of the dreaded MSBlast worm from August. The first two flaws are buffer overruns, which allow a hacker to take over a computer by swamping it with data. The third is a denial-of-service flaw that affects a component known as the remote procedure call (RPC)--just like the flaw Blaster used. To protect your PC against this one, march yourself over to the company's Web site to download the patch. If you have XP, just use the automatic updates. Already, many experts are warning that the next worm to exploit these new flaws could come any moment. What's Microsoft doing about it besides issuing patches? This week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer surprisingly became the latest Microsoft bigwig to acknowledge that its so-called Trustworthy Computing initiative is failing, and he challenged his company and the industry to work more closely together to come up with ways to thwart these attacks. As 12-steppers like to say, the first step toward a solution is realizing that there is a problem. Maybe there's hope for Microsoft, after all. |
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Norton 2004
All the recent frenzy over virus threats has gotten you readers very interested in the tools to protect yourselves and your machines. So when a big security software name like Symantec introduces a new line of products, you definitely sit up and take notice. The full lineup is now available to buy, but we're still busy evaluating them all. However, we're already alarmed by one addition to this year's products: a new product-activation requirement. While Symantec says that this was added to "protect" the public from pirated versions, we know from past experience that such activation could foul up installation--on top of just being meddlesome. And with McAfee's new versions on the horizon and so many antivirus options out there, such issues may be enough to scare users away from the popular Norton line. |
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Ares Galaxy
After reading about the RIAA lawsuits, you'd think file sharing would be pretty much dead. Well, it's definitely slowing down. But there are still plenty of folks who say they plan to actively continue getting their music by trading it with others online, and the latest way to do that is Ares Galaxy. According to publisher Softgap's description, it's a "spyware-free file-sharing program" that lets you "search and download your favorite music and video files shared by other users on a free peer-to-peer network." Boy, that sounds familiar. Many CNET users have already declared it the next Kazaa and implore others to join now to build up the user base. But some of the negative buzz includes a warning: it's unreliable in letting you determine which files you want to share, which means that those who want to steer clear of the RIAA by simply not sharing copyrighted files could be left vulnerable. Also, there doesn't seem to be any mention of this program trying to mask your identity; with those warnings, use at your own risk. |
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