By Rob Beschizza @ Wired Blogs

With the launch of iTunes Plus, Apple’s become the first to sell DRM-free music from a major label. Not included in the press release is the fact that all such downloads are watermarked, containing the user’s full name and email address.

It’s quite clever, when you think about it. The only way it could ever be a privacy concern for the user is if they do something they shouldn’t, such as share the file with others. If you think that DRM-free music is an excuse to start throwing it up by the gigabyte on Bittorrent, there could be public humiliation and, perhaps, a legal suprise or two in your future.

Moreover, iTunes itself could easily spot tracks in its own library that have been illegally shared by other users. Perhaps by getting on the DRM-free bandwagon, Apple’s managed to make itself the copyright entrapment-meister general.

iTunes Plus - plus user details that is [Inquirer]

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With all the hoopla flying around lately, we had already pretty much known this. The interesting part of this article is that it lays out the terms which Novell has released for the first time since the agreement. It is particular to note:

Microsoft’s promised patent indemnification to paying SUSE users specifically excludes open source software like Wine, OpenExchange, StarOffice and OpenOffice by name.

It also excludes:

• “office productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software etc.)…that are hosted by or running on a computer acting as a server for a connected client device” (think Google);

• “business application designed, marketed and used to meet the data processing requirements of particular business functions, financial forecasting, financial reporting, customer relationship management and supply chain management” (think salesforce.com);

• “mail transfer agents (a k a e-mail servers)”;

• “unified communications”;

• and video games consoles, console games, video game applications designed to run on a computer and online video gaming services like Xbox Live.

The implication is you can run SUSE free of patent concerns but you’d better be darn careful what you run on top of it. Otherwise you’re good for six years after the last of the covered patents expires.

Um…yeah. Go read the entire article Ajax World Magazine….

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Every large Internet company has an online security team in place, and Google is no different. Now the search engine giant is going public. Yesterday, Google launched its new online security blog. The blog will post news on its little-known antimalware team, which, it turns out, has been in existence for about a year.

In its initial post, Google clarifies its now-famous one-in-10-Web-sites-are-malicious statement, derived from a presentation Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu gave at last month’s Hotbots 2007. Provos says the figure that is quoted in the media should be 0.1 percent (less than 1 percent) since the analysis used in the paper, “The Ghost in the Browser” (in PDF), covers several billion Web sites. From that number, presenters selected a subgroup of 12 million, of which 1 million were found to be engaging in drive-by downloads of malicious code. There’s also a colorful map in today’s post showing which countries are responsible for hosting compromised Web sites and distribution servers (the U.S. and China both appear bright red, with Canada and Russia coming in a close second on each map).

Read more at CNet News…

Google Security Blog 

Microsoft is not the real patent threat Linux and open source developers should be worried about, said Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, the software giant will itself be fighting against the software patents system within a few years, Shuttleworth predicted.

Shuttleworth was responding to a recent Fortune magazine interview in which senior Microsoft figures sent shockwaves through the software industry by declaring that Linux and other open source software violates 235 Microsoft patents.

But while Microsoft is using familiar tactics to put the fear into Linux users, Shuttleworth argued open source and Microsoft are ultimately on the same side of the software patent issue.

“I’m pretty certain that, within a few years, Microsoft themselves will be strong advocates against software patents,” Shuttleworth wrote. “Microsoft is irrevocably committed to shipping new software every year, and software patents represent landmines in their roadmap which they are going to step on, like it or not, with increasing regularity.”

Microsoft makes the “perfect target” for software patent lawsuits, and the company will pay more for such suits every year until they finally threaten its business, Shuttleworth said.

More at ComputerWorld UK… 

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