Digital music is set to take another kick in the teeth. Have you got any tracks you downloaded from the MSN Music service? If so, think again because on the 31 August Microsoft are going to turn off the license servers. This means that which you bought with your hard-earned will eventually become nothing more than digital detritus on your hard disk. Read more

Not content with the hullabaloo created by their colonial cousins, the RIAA, the British-based Music Business Group (MBG) have their sight firmly set on iPod users. Read more

We never realised how useful an ftp server could be until we had one each, back when ISPs issued users with a block of IP addresses so that every computer on line had its own unique address. That was in the days of System 8 and 9 when Mac’s Users and Groups permissions settings were a lot easier to control and seemingly more robust against foreign intrusion. A simple piece of software was all it took to get ftp up and running. It was easy to understand and gave us each the flexibility to offer a space for files to be sent that were too large to email. Or to make work available for clients and service bureaux to download. We had two ftp servers running, one each, and used them extensively. Read more

1 Enter a competition run by Microsoft where the other computers on offer are a Sony Vaio running Vista or Fujitsu laptop running Linux, which apparently no-one seemed greatly interested in winning.

2. Three weeks before the competition try to break into a MacBook Air and on finding it secure, spend a week preparing what is rumoured to be a Java exploit in a web browser.

3. On the first day of the competition, continue trying to crack into the MacBook without success.

4. On the second day of the competition, go to your website where you have left the file you prepared in advance. Download the file and let it run on the computer. Surprise, surprise, you’ve gained access to the computer which you have just won and the $10,000 cash prize as well.

However, you did gain access. The guy trying to crack the Vista machine took another day and he used a Flash exploit to get in.

• Should Mac users be worried? No.
• Should we run anti-virus software? It wasn’t a virus that cracked the MacBook, although ClamXav is a free virus detector so it seems sensible to run it just in case.
• Should we turn the Firewall and security Preference Panes on? Yes, as well as router firewalls, and enable stealth mode too.
• Should Apple fix the problem? Definitely. They seem ready to dump Java as a default install and these Safari ‘glitches’ are becoming tiresome to read about.