Some Apple news: iTunes price drop, iPhone & MacOS X

iTunes lower prices
Apple has lowered pricing of the iTunes DRM free music to just $0,99 per track.

iPhone
The iPhone will be launched on 29 November in France. They are “getting closer” to Belgium. Now, the good news is that Apple has made a deal with Orange and according to AppleGazette this iPhone will be an unlocked version. Selling a device with an subscription is against the law in our country. We now can expect to see the iPhone be sold in Belgium without any subscriptions, which is a good thing. Freedom of choice.

Het Nieuwsblad, a Belgian newspaper, is giving away 3 iPhones even while the iPhone isn’t available for Belgium. The iPhones will not be delivered by Apple Benelux. The devices will be purchased in an US based Apple Store and will get an “SIM lock removal”. Cool, and with the next Apple update you have iPhone brick until the next unlock procedure.

And we can expect an iPhone SDK for developers in Febr 2008. Finally, we should be able to run native applications on the iPhone just like other smartphones allow.

Mac OS X Leopard
At last, MacOS X Leopard will be in the shops on 26 October 2007. What I already like is the Time Machine and Spaces so this new version will be placed on my 4 year old Mac very fast together with a new very big hard disk because I’m running out of space.

MP3 based stock spam outbreak

After the PDF, Excel and ZIP based spam outbreaks we now have a stock spam outbreak based on the popular MP3 format for delivering audio. The messages are between 85kB and 150kB and contain an MP3 in poor quality at a 16 kbps bitrate and 11 KHz sample rate with an average length of 30 seconds. T avoid email filters these files are highly randomized.

The attachment files names range from well known artists like smashingpumpkins.mp3, bbrown.mp3, bspears.mp3, gloriaestefan.mp3, beatles.mp3 to and some obvious poplar sound names like answeringmachine.mp3, coolringtone.mp3, listentothis.mp3. The subject only contains Fwd: or Re:.

MX Lab protects clients against this new form of spam with the Recurrent Pattern Technology ™ (RPD) from Commtouch®. According to our technology partner Commtouch®, the outbreak accounts for around 7-10% of all spam, globally, over the past 18 hours. The first MP3 spams where detected on October 17, 2007, 21:24 GMT.