New and Noteworthy: iTunes Music Store Launches in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland; Security under obscurity; more

iTunes Music Store Launches in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland Apple has launched four new iTunes Music Stores in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland featuring songs from all four major music companies and over 1,000 independent record labels. In conjunction with the iTunes Music Store launch in Switzerland, Apple and UBS today announced a promotion to give every Swiss citizen a free song on the iTunes Music Store as part of their new "UBS Generation" and "UBS Campus" packages. UBS is offering song cards for music downloads in all of their branches, which can be used instead of a credit card to purchase tracks from the iTunes Music Store. More.

Security under obscurity Larry Seltzer, writing for eWeek, asks "How long can you fly under the Malware radar?" discussing the security afforded to Windows alternatives by their relative obscurity. Seltzer writes "So, the question becomes: How long can you get away with it? How long can you run on a Mac, or use Firefox on Windows, and expect to avoid security problems? Put another way, when will the authors of malware decide it's time to start targeting Mac and Firefox users? Even the short answers are complicated: I think it will be a long time before we start seeing Mac viruses in any meaningful numbers. The Mac would have to be far, far more popular than it is now for malware authors to have sufficient confidence that they could get attacks to spread and achieve the endemic status of Bagle, Netsky and the other luminaries of the Windows malware world. No matter how bad a vulnerability gets on the Mac, it's still an unsatisfying target for a malware author." More.

A British perspective on Tiger The BBC has a brief review of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), noting that many major features are US-specific, and offering some reader feedback. An excerpt: "At the moment most of the widgets are very US-centric - US traffic information only, for example - but Apple is keen for people to develop their own widgets so it will not take long for a raft of new mini-applications to be launched. Widgets are still embryonic but they could prove to be a killer application for Mac OS X as people customize their internet experience, not through browsers, but through these mini programs." More.

Previously on MacFixIt

• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) #12: Malicious Widget Installation; More on SCSI problems; Potential AirPort re-connect fix; more
• Apple releases iTunes 4.8

Resources