iTunes Blocked in China Over Free Tibet Album?

Over 60 comments on one Apple forum thread relate to problems downloading music from iTunes in China, and now it’s believed that China has blocked access to Apple’s store altogether. Apparently there’s some correlation with the restricted access and the release of a pro-Tibet album by The Art of Peace Foundation, “Songs for Tibet.”

And while it may seems like a nasty stereotype to jump on the Chinese government for internet censorship, various IT analysts around China have agreed that the government has most likely cut the lines to the iTunes store. From PCMag:

The core URL “seems to be stopped on the China side” but worked when accessed from abroad, said Danny Levinson, CEO of a digital direct marketing company in Shanghai.

Thank goodness I’m in the USA where I have unfettered access to all the Monkees my iPod can hold. [PCMag]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wuala P2P online storage service goes live

Wuala is a social file storage application that we first looked at back in February. At the time, Wuala was in private beta, but starting today anyone can sign up for an account.

Unlike other file storage/sharing services, Wuala doesn’t provide you with web space. Rather, your files are encrypted and then stored on the computers of other Wuala users. While this might sound a bit scary, the upshot is that you can store large amounts of data. The more space you allocate for Wuala on your hard drive, the more online space you can access. And your files are duplicated on multiple computers so that you shouldn’t have problems accessing your files even if some of the folks in your network have turned their machines off for the night.

Wuala has a desktop client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you can use to upload and download files. Or you can access a web interface. The service is still in beta, so nobody’s promising that all the kinks have been worked out. But as of today, Wuala is in public beta, not private.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Net Nanny for the Mac released

Are you concerned about the youngsters in your household being exposed to inappropriate content on the Web?

ContentWatch today announced the release of Net Nanny for the Mac, the first Mac version of their popular Internet filtering and parental control software.

With Net Nanny, you can block access to gambling and pornography sites, and specify what games or sites (enabled with parental ratings) your kids can visit. NetNanny does this by integrating with Safe Search options on most major search engines, including Google, MSN, AllTheWeb, Yahoo, Dogpile, Lycos, and AltaVista.

NetNanny provides usage reports so parents can see what each user has been viewing on the Internet, browser alerts when access to an inappropriate or blocked page is attempted, time restrictions for users, and a Content Assistant feature to define the right level of protection for each user.

Although ContentWatch’s Web site hasn’t yet been updated with news about the Mac release, their press release announcing the new software states that the Mac product info will be listed at http://netnanny.com/mac/.

NetNanny is available for US$39.99 for the first license, with each additional computer in the house costing just $19.99. The application is available in English, German, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Apple’s MobileMe Launch Problems Might Be Just the Beginning

The MobileMe launch was a massive flusteruck—even Steve said so. Our long national nightmare is over though, right? Well, Om is reporting that their whole net infrastructure is a few years behind where it should be, and if it’s as bad as he’s heard, “then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems.”

Here’s his bullet point list of Apple’s infrastructure issues:

•There is no-unified IT plan vis-a-vis applications; each has their own set of servers, IT practices and release scenarios.

•Developers do testing, load testing and infrastructure planning, all of which is implemented by someone else.

•There’s no unified monitoring system.

•They use Oracle on Sun servers for the databases and everything has its own SAN storage. They do not use active Oracle RAC; it is all single-instance, on one box, with a secondary failover.

•Apparently they are putting web servers and app servers on the same machines, which causes performance problems.

Whether Apple likes it or not, it is in the networking business now. It’s part of the package, and if they’re gonna promise stuff will “just work,” it needs to from every angle, especially the ones that should be invisible to the consumer (like connectivity). We hope MobileMe’s problems aren’t a sign of things to come. Maybe Google could teach them a thing or two. [GigaOM]

Popularity: 12% [?]

Apple pulls out of proposed Black Hat talk

Though I’m far too dumb to understand what they’re talking about, I like the Black Hat hacker guys. Most of the Internet is all “New Vegas” now; all (supposedly) family friendly and glamorous and glitzy. But those guys are back on the Strip, gambling with everything they’ve got and shoulder to shoulder with the dregs of society.

Unfortunately, Apple’s marketing department doesn’t share my feelings. Computerworld says they’ve put the kibosh on a speaking engagement they were supposed to have at the conference next week in Sin City. In fact, they can’t even say they were asked to pass — everyone involved in organizing the panel, which was set up early last month and “abruptly canceled” late last month, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Which is a shame — organizers of the conference say the panel was supposed to be all about how serious security is at Apple and how they’re committed to keeping users secure. And it wasn’t even supposed to be a Q&A, which is why the organizers thought it would easily be approved by marketing.

That, however, wasn’t the case — while the panel wasn’t yet approved by the conference folks, the request to have the panel was pulled. We’re sure the Black Hat guys will still have fun (it is Vegas, after all), but it’s a shame we couldn’t get that look inside Apple’s security team. [computerworld]

Popularity: 6% [?]