Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
iTunes Plus with DRM-free tracks are finally here, but each track,
DRM-free or no, contains the name you used to register iTunes to
dissuade you from placing your songs on P2P networks.
Apple’s gone partially DRM-free, but a surprising discovery reported online says that your name, your email address and other personal details are embedded into each track that you purchase from iTunes, whether it has DRM to protect it, or not.
Following this discovery, the EFF said additional information had been found in iTunes files, possibly amounting to an additional ‘digital watermark’, allowing songs uploaded from iTunes to be easily identified.
Unfortunately, hackers are already working on ways to strip this information from iTunes’s DRM-free EMI songs, as well as ‘spoof’ the information to make it appear as through from someone else, as surprise and mild outrage spreads that Apple has included this information with DRM-free music downloads.
Apple’s DRM-free tracks cost a US 30c premium over non-DRM tracks, and offer encoding at a higher quality bitrate – 256kbps instead of 128kbps, making songs played through an iPod to a large speaker system sound much better than the older 128kbps format.
Clearly, users don’t like the idea they are being tracked while paying extra for DRM-free(dom), but the chances are that most iTunes buyers will be happy, law-abiding citizens who have no plans to uploaded iTunes music content.
Those that do want to upload music from EMI purchased from iTunes have been given fair warning- if you upload songs to P2P networks, chances are EMI and Apple will find out and will come down on you like a ton of bricks.
At least, until the hackers release a DRM-free clean up patch to the iTunes files.
No-one yet knows how successful the DRM-free experiment will be, or if it will sell more songs to consumers, but so far, Apple’s sweet start has, at least for some, turned a little sour.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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