Odds & Ends: iTunes Tuner down?; Deskstar lawsuit; Pismo pink screen; more

iTunes Radio Tuner down? We have not been able to connect to any radio stations in iTunes today. Howard Kaufman had the same problem recently. He received an email about this from Live365.com (which hosts most of the stations) which may be the explanation. It stated in part: "We're still cleaning the dust off after a large scale system upgrade over the weekend. All streams were down for a period of about 20 hours. We're still working out a few kinks to the service. There are also some changes to third party player bookmarks..."

Update: David Badovinac writes (and we have confirmed) that Live365 itself is not down. The problem is more likely that they changed at least some of their addresses and iTunes' bookmarks will need to be updated.

Deskstar 75GXP lawsuit A class action lawsuit has been filed against IBM regarding their Deskstar 75GXP drive (which Apple has used in some Power Mac G4s). The suit alleges that: "IBM has represented to plaintiff and members of the class that the Deskstar 75GXP is a safe and reliable disk drive for accessing and storing data on a personal computer. To the contrary, due to a uniform defect in the design and/or manufacturing process, when such a defect manifests the Deskstar 75GXP 'crashes' without warning and results in the irretrievable loss of data and programs stored on the disk." [Note on Ars Technica site and spotted by Brian Leslie.]

Pismo pink screen Last week, Étienne Beaulé sent us an email describing a symptom with the LCD screen of his Pismo (FireWire) PowerBook: "After several months, a faint pink discoloration may appear, typically on the lower left corner. You will definitely see it most when starting up or when waking from sleep. The problem appears to be a defective backlight and seems to surface about a year after the manufacturing date." This seemed almost too minor to post here (the fact that we have a Pismo and have never seen this also did not encourage us to post it). However, Étienne sent the same email to MacInTouch and they did decide to post it. Since then, they have received and posted several emails from other readers confirming the same symptom. So, in case you have this problem, now you know that you are not alone. Apple has apparently agreed to replace the screen in some cases but has no stated official policy on this matter.

IntelliPoint driver links working again The links to download the IntelliPoint Drivers for Macintosh were not working for the past week or so. As of today, however, they were up and running again. These are for OS 9 only; there are no OS X drivers as yet.