Yesterday, Apple released iTunes 4.5, which deliberately broke the 4.2 authentication scheme, which had been successfully reverse-engineered. However, crazney has been at it again, and within 24 hours of downloading iTunes 4.5, has broken the new scheme, and added more features to this library along the way. If you want to incorporate iTMS support in your program, give libopendaap a go!

aQuantive, one of the Web's largest advertising companies, has quietly formed a new operating unit to profile Web surfers and deliver targeted online ads.

For example, someone repeatedly reading home-improvement material at sites like The New York Times online or About.com might see an ad for Home Depot when they visit a partner site. And because the efforts are narrowly targeted at individuals, Drive PM said it can sell the ad at a higher price.

Howe said Drive PM will avoid privacy pitfalls by keeping consumers' personal information--such as names, phone numbers and addresses--private. "We know about their past behaviors but couldn't call them up on the phone," he said.

Analysts IDC reckons that spam represented 32 per cent of all email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, doubling from 2001. That figure is less than the 50 per cent or more junk mail statistic commonly cited by email-filtering firms like MessageLabs and Brightmail but it still represents a serious problem.

The effect of spam - measured in clogged inboxes, lost worker productivity and wasted IT resources - is measured in millions of dollars annually for larger organisations. Adding to this, three-quarters of the IT executives responding to an IDC survey feel the spam tsunami will only get worse over the next two years.

IDC surveyed 1,000 IT managers representing organizations of various sizes and industries in North America in developing its return on investment calculations. It also interviewed 30 senior IT executives representing a range of vertical industries in greater detail.

Amazon recently took the wraps off its initial public beta version of A9, and we got the first sneak peek. It's easy to see why the new engine might set Google and other search-driven companies on edge: A9 is a credible step toward making a search engine that knows you and acts as your agent online.

As to what is new, the most obvious feature is your personal search history -- which is integrated into your entire search experience. So your entire search history is available to you, and with the toolbar, that includes all your searches across any search site, as well as all your browsing on the Web.

The history server stores -- on our servers -- your history of interaction with us for the purpose of bringing that back to you in a very convenient way. Whenever you come to the site, we can show you what you searched for in the past in a very easy-to-organize fashion. If you want to hide some of that, you can opt out at any time. If you install the toolbar, then all your Web browsing, as well as all your searching, is stored as well. And we are working on many different ways to improve that.

The Internet service provider on Thursday said it found an average of nearly 28 spyware items on each PC it scanned during the first quarter. The company, in conjunction with Webroot Software, conducted a total of 1.06 million scans through its Spy Audit service. The majority of the items found were relatively harmless, EarthLink said, but some represented serious problems.

"While most spyware is adware-related and relatively benign, it's disturbing that over 300,000 of the more serious system monitors and (Trojan horses) were uncovered. This figure represents how real a threat identity theft or system corruption is for users," Matt Cobb, EarthLink's vice president of core applications, said in a statement.

The Spy Audit service is available to all Internet users, not just EarthLink subscribers.

Despite concerns about spam, retailers are still finding e-mail a profitable way to market to customers. But according to Doug Mack, CEO of online imaging technology provider Scene7, over the long term, e-mail in its current familiar format risks the same fate as banner ads. "Much like banner ads, after they first started, e-mail will atrophy in its performance because it starts to burn people out," he says. "So the next generation of e-mail will be dynamic."

Mack envisions e-mail in the future as a rich HTML message with images and graphics dynamically generated and customized by recipient, based on a shoppers’ online shopping and browsing behavior. Images, even video, could launch in an e-mail to grab the shopper’s attention. "People have the capability to delete an e-mail when it’s in preview, before they have actually read one word of it. But it’s almost impossible not to look at that image before you hit the delete button," he says.

Put the right image and right product in front of the right customers, overlay them graphically with, for example, a free shipping offer if the customer has been shown to respond to free shipping promotions, and you have what Mack calls "the double whammy. It’s just going to pull you in."

A California state senator today said she was drafting legislation to block Google Inc.'s free e-mail service "Gmail" because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words.

"We think it's an absolute invasion of privacy. It's like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home," Sen. Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from Fremont, California, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

In late March, the world's No. 1 Web search company announced plans to launch Gmail -- a service that would offer users 1 gigabyte of free storage, more than 100 times the storage offered by other free services from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

But in return for the extra storage, users would agree to let Google's technology scan their incoming e-mail, then deliver targeted ads based on key words in the messages. For instance, a user receiving a message about a friend's flu symptoms might also receive ads for cold and flu remedies.

Telstra is using the prices charged for its music downloads as a means of boosting its broadband sales, the Australian Music Retailers Association claims.

"For years the industry has been battling the scourge of illegal downloads, so it is hard to imagine that consumers are unaware of the ability to buy music online," he said. "Telstra wants to sell broadband subscriptions, and they want to use music to do it."

On April 1, Telstra announced that it would be offering tracks at 99 Australian cents each for the month; uptil then the regular price for downloads had been $1.49 per track for BigPond members and $1.89 for others.

"The wholesale cost for chart tracks from major suppliers generally ranges from $1.05 to $1.17 so by no stretch of the imagination can you say that Telstra is doing anything but selling the music.. below cost so they can attract more broadband subscribers," Bonouvrié said.

Rafe Needleman is debating whether or not he likes the so-called "embedded" text advertising from Vibrant Media's IntelliTxt. It isn't all that new, but the concept is gaining sites that will use it. In fact, InfoSync, which is the link in the post beneath this one has used a similar advertising method for a while now. Basically, it underlines certain words within the text of the page, and if you mouse over the word, it pops up a little advertisement. Rafe points out that, as a writer, he doesn't necessarily like his text to be riddled with advertising that way. However, my complaint is from the standpoint of a reader. I don't know if I'm different that most surfers, but I tend to use my mouse cursor as a sort of "pointer" to help me keep track of what I'm reading. When I read sites that have this kind of advertising, it becomes very difficult to read, because just as I get somewhere, a pop-up blocks what I'm reading. It's quite annoying. At the same time, it also makes it much more difficult to pick out actual links. Yet another bad idea that tries to make online advertising intrusive rather than fitting it into what users are looking for. Trust me, the last thing I want to do is to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence I'm reading.

Phatbot is a variant of a Agobot, a big family of IRC bots. It can steal personal information such as email addresses, credit card numbers, PayPay details and software licensing codes. It forwards this information using a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, rather than IRC channels exploited by its predecessors. Earlier versions of the bug go by monikers such as Phat, Backdoor.Agobot.fo and Gaobot, according to F-Secure.

Phatbot inserts backdoors which can be used to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at shutting down Web sites including those of German Internet hosting company Schlund, US telecoms firm XO and Stanford University. The bug also terminates processes belonging to competing malware such as MSBlast.

"Phatbot is causing quite a bit of stir over here," said Conor Flynn, technical director of US e-security company Rits. "The US Department of Homeland Security sent a number of companies an emergency release about the worm which was then leaked anonymously to The Washington Post," he told ElectricNews.Net. The potential impact of Phatbot on users is much bigger than with previous worms and viruses ,vecause it can harvest passwords, product registration codes and credit card numbers and then send this information back to the authors, he said.