Apple and PayPal today announced that the iTunes Music Store in the US will now accept PayPal for purchases of music downloads, audiobooks and gift certificates. Starting today, iTunes Music Store purchases can be funded through PayPal’s virtual wallet, allowing customers to pay in the way they prefer—using a credit card, bank account or stored account balance. The first 500,000 customers to open a new iTunes account in the US using PayPal as their form of payment before March 31, 2005, will receive five free songs.

From a consumer-electronics standpoint, 2004 marked the reemergence of the video-game industry as a major economic force, the beginnings of the commoditization of the PC market, and the further spread of pervasive wireless technologies into every facet of our lives. As consumers, we can now choose from a bewildering array of digital devices, services, and technologies, all of which seek to bring us to the exalted state of nerdvana. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There's never been a better time to be a consumer, and this year, companies such as Apple Computer, Dell, and Sony are providing the most exciting consumer-electronics gadgets from which to pick. Here are some of the most exciting tech toys of 2004.

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Apple has still not properly fixed the HFS+ filesystem named fork vulnerability discovered last week, according to the company that first noticed it, NetSec.

The fix put out by the company at the end of last week will only address the security flaw for OS X systems running the Apache web server which is shipped by default. Customers using other web servers such as 4D WebSTAR remain vulnerable the managed security specialist has claimed.

In addition, those running modified versions of the Apache web server on OS X would not have received the update patch automatically, but would not necessarily realise this. The vulnerability risks allowing attackers to exploit URLs to gain access to back-end data structures and carry out website defacement or information theft.

IDC yesterday forecast worldwide PC shipments will grow by 10.1 percent to 195.1 million [in 2005], compared with expected growth of 14.5 percent this year and 177.2 million units shipped. The growth rate was 11.9 percent in 2003 and 1.9 percent in 2002.

The Framingham research firm said its 2005 forecast is buoyed by strong third-quarter results and continued PC demand in the commercial sector, which is expected to post 11.3 percent growth in PC shipments next year, compared with consumer growth rates of 8 percent worldwide and just 5.1 percent in the United States.

Goldman also said that for the first time in three years, the Macintosh installed based should start to grow again with unit shipments rising 10% in calendar 2004. "In calendar 2005, stronger sales of Apple's recently refreshed iMac and Power Mac desktops (off of easy comparisons), pull from the popularity of iPod, and the continued shift to notebooks should fuel unit growth of 10% compared to our industry growth estimate of 9%," the firm said.

Monday, October 4th 2004 ended a six-year dispute involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart's allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow residing.

Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood, as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars.

Stewart filed her case in 1999, after viewing the Matrix, which she felt had been based on her manuscript, "The Third Eye," copyrighted in 1981. In the mid-eighties Stewart had submitted her manuscript to an ad placed by the Wachowski Brothers, requesting new sci-fi works.

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that "credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers." These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been "often used during preparation of the motion pictures."

The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success.

Apple has accused the owner of iTunes.co.uk of being a cybersquatter, and taken him to UK registry Nominet demanding to be given the domain.

Unfortunately, the owner happens to be one Benjamin Cohen, the "dotcom millionaire" of lore, whose father is a solicitor, and Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on.

As a press release put out by Cohen makes clear, he registered the domain "itunes.co.uk" on 7 November 2000, and two days later made use of it by forwarding it to a music search engine service at his CyberBritain site.

Apple, on the other hand, only had trademark for "iTunes" published in the Trade Marks Journal on 6 December 2000. It was granted a limited trademark that did not cover music products on 23 March 2001, and eventually went live with its iTunes offering in June this year - four years after Ben Cohen first registered iTunes.co.uk. Cohen claims he had no idea that Apple was planning to build an iTunes service, and that he has been using it legitimately all that time.

Nevertheless, Apple has been dogged in its pursuit of the domain. Since November this year, CyberBritain has received between 30 and 40 letters from Apple's solicitors over the domain and even offered a small sum for it (a common domain ploy which seeks to prove some kind of profitable intent by the owner). Finally, it has taken the issue to Nominet, where it will be put through the organisation's domain resolution process.

Fortunately for Cohen, Apple's approach is more bark than bite. Apple would have a hard time winning such a case through ICANN's Uniform Dispute Resolution Process (UDRP), which is notoriously friendly towards big companies. However, a .co.uk domain is the jurisdiction of Nominet, and the UK registry has taken a far more commonsense approach to domain disputes.

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Firefox users click through to Web site ads four to five times less often than do users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, a German Web-advertising firm said Friday.

Based on its analysis of 1,000 sites and the click-through behavior of users equipped with various browsers, Frankfurt-based Adtech AG reported that only 0.11 percent of Firefox users click on ads. Internet Explorer users, on the other hand, click through at rates ranging from 0.44 percent (IE 6) to 0.53 percent (IE 5.5).

"The causes probably lie in the different surfing behavior [of Firefox and IE users], or switching on the popup blocker," said Dirk Freytag, AdTech's chief operating officer, in a statement.

Mozilla's Firefox sports an integrated pop-up ad blocker, but IE--with the exception of the updated edition in Windows XP SP2--does not.

Last week, Apple announced the availability of a mega patch that addressed seventeen security vulnerabilities. Some of the vulnerabilities affected open-source components of Mac OS X such as Apache while other vulnerabilities affected Apple’s in-house code. Ironically, Microsoft IIS 6.0 which is at the butt of many jokes in the IT industry has never had a confirmed flaw in almost 2 years of existence while I’ve had to patch my Apache servers on a quarterly bases [sic]! The response to Apple’s mega patch has been along the usual Mac evangelist lines of "we don’t need to patch it" or "Apple is doing a good job patching it". The truth of the matter is, the Mac platform is simply too small for anyone to care. However, if the Mac community continues to flaunt it, someone will take them up on the challenge.

The Mac platform is too sparse for the spread of conventional Mac based worms ... it is entirely conceivable that a Windows based worm can be designed to attack Mac based vulnerabilities along with UNIX ones. Mac OS is now essentially UNIX since it’s based on FreeBSD. The worm in this case could be particularly vicious against the Mac or UNIX machine since it wouldn’t rely on it as a host for reproduction. Using Windows as a vehicle for replication and a launch pad for an all out assult, the worm can be harmless to Windows while leaving a wake of destruction for Mac and UNIX boxes with formatted hard disks ... Ultimately, there is no substitute for vigilance and good security practices no matter who’s software you use.