Users Get Burnt
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday June 15, 2002
The record industy's attempt to inhibit CD piracy with the use of a copy prevention code is having disastrous effects on Macs.
Walk into almost any music store in Australia and you will see stacks of blank CD-R and
CD-RW discs for sale. Across the country, the CD burners are working overtime, churning out copies of everything from Vivaldi to Puff Daddy.
It is an activity made easy by Apple's CD and DVD burner-equipped Power Macs, iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks and iTunes, the software that comes bundled with all of them. It is a natural progression from the decades-old tradition of taping LPs (and later CDs) to make copies for cars and holiday houses.
But, suddenly, danger has entered the equation. Recent albums from Celine Dion and Shakira have been spiked with copy-prevention code that has been shown to damage the firmware of computers. Late-model iMacs have been particularly vulnerable.
A spokesman for the Australian Record Industry Association, Michael Speck, says the record industry isn't bothered by one-off, in-the-bedroom copying but it is alarmed by the capacity of music pirates in China, Indonesia, Israel and elsewhere to turn out millions of contraband copies of top-40 CDs. Pressing plants in Indonesia are capable of producing 250 million discs a year, he says. Israel is as big and China could make more than both of them put together.
Speck says the music companies, alarmed by the explosion of piracy, are now doing no more than locking their windows and doors against professional burglars.
Not even a partially honest CD-copying person would deny Sony's right to protect its property. The problem, which Speck avoided, was that in slamming the doors, Sony crushed the fingers of many Macintosh and PC users whose machines had been frozen by the "poisoned" discs.
Speck says Sony is testing its protection code in Britain and Europe only. No such discs have gone on sale in Australia.
"But [embedded copy protection] will come, as night follows day," Speck says.
So, may we caution you and advise vigilance. Examine the music discs you buy. Sony says those with copy protection are clearly labelled.
Of course, eager hackers have immediately developed antidotes. One is as simple as using a black marker pen to cover the copy-protect track on the outer rim of the CD.
So, war has been declared. Doubtless the music companies will continue to try to protect their property and computer experts (or slick pen users) will keep on thwarting them. And if something better than Sony has so far tried is not found, honest people will have to be wary about inadvertently damaging their computers simply by trying to have some music on while they work, let alone making copies of it.
Smoother operator
Two important downloads have arrived on the Internet - an upgrade of MacOS X to 10.1.5 and some improvements to Office:mac V.X. Both are free. The OS X update fixes some bugs but it is not Jaguar, the next major rebuild that was previewed to Apple developers at the World Wide Developers' Conference in San Jose in May.
OS X 10.1.5 is reported to be more stable, has support for PC card serial communication devices and improved support for some peripheral devices. Networking is better and it seems to run a bit faster. Support has been included for the latest digital cameras from Canon and Nikon as well as for several external disc drives.
If you have Microsoft's expensive, but excellent, Office:mac v.X, go to www.microsoft.com/mac and download Service Release 1. Microsoft says it includes more than 1000 performance improvements, making the suite faster, more stable, and more efficient. On-screen text has been smoothed by using Apple's Quartz drawing engine and Excel now has support for Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and integration with FileMaker Server so that data can be imported from a local FileMaker database.
© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald