Apple Inc. has filed an updated application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office for a product activation and anti-piracy technology that would give the company the same kind of control over its software as the oft-criticized Windows Genuine Advantage platform provides its rival, Microsoft Corp.

Patent application 20070288886, titled "Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks" and dated Dec. 13, spells out a "digital rights management system" that would "restrict execution of that application to specific hardware platforms."

Apple has filed for a patent in software DRM, that describes a method for restricting software to specific hardware platforms.

In fact the Run-Time Code Injection To Perform Checks patent application reads very much like a method for preventing attempts to get Mac OS X to run on non-Apple systems.

Libraries and their patrons across the country have added their voice to the growing dispute over proposed copyright legislation which could impose levies on iPods, memory cards, and raise the price of blank CDs and cassette tapes in 2008.

The levies, proposed by the Canadian Private Copying Collective, would be aimed to reduce users copying illegally shared files to disc, and increasingly, to mass-storage digital players such as the ubiquitous iPod. The CPCC, a non-profit agency that works on behalf of the music industry, recommends surcharges of $75 on MP3 players of more than 10 gigabytes, $25 on smaller players, and an eight-cent increase on every blank compact disc and Mini disc.

The Canadian Library Association says pending copyright legislation is unbalanced and does not reflect the concerns of some 21 million library users and registered librarians across Canada.....

The new legislative reforms will likely meet the demands of the Canadian Recording Industry Association by making it illegal to download or share songs on the internet without paying a fee.

Amendments would also apply to the circumvention of technologies that protect against infringement and "persons who, for infringing purposes, enable or facilitate circumvention or who, without authorization, distribute copyright material."

The CLA says these amendments make the same mistakes as the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Given Apple's marketing toward the young and the trendy, you wouldn't expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won't expect it either.

Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing consumer electronics and closely related software products. Apple develops, sells, and supports a series of personal computers, portable media players, mobile phones, computer software, and computer hardware and hardware accessories....

The military is interested in Macintosh computers to protect its systems against hack. It turns out to be tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, thanks to these computers.

Before I describe my experiences with the Mac OS, I would first like to discuss the history of the Mac operating system and why it is important.

The Mac OS is older than Microsoft Windows, and it's seen considerably more releases than its counterpart. The first version, then simply called 'System 1.0', appeared in 1984. The first edition of Windows was released in 1985, over a year-and-a-half later.

The original Mac OS is seen by many as the first graphical user interface that breached the mass market. This is partially true, but it certainly was not the first ever publicly available Graphical User Interface (GUI).

From a purely Apple perspective, the Mac OS has its roots in an earlier Apple computer, the Lisa. The Lisa was a revolutionary computer that was the one of the first to sport a GUI as its connection to the end user. It was released in 1983, one year before the first Mac, and despite its groundbreaking design, it was over priced (it cost £10,000 in 1983!) - and doomed to failure because of it.

The Big Four record labels want us to think that the sound recording business is a reformed character these days. Recently, we've heard ritualistic self-flagellations from a succession of top executives. There was Ed Bronfman at Warner's, prostrating himself in front of Apple. In a similar vein, Universal's chief Doug Morris admitted UMG had been clueless, and got it all wrong. EMI's new asset-stripping chief Guy Hands issues almost weekly memos telling the company to reform or die. While over at Sony BMG, staff have been told they must, er... blog their way back into music lover's hearts.

For years, the Big Five (now Four) have preferred to litigate rather than license their catalogues, but we were told that was no longer the case.....

According to Michael Robertson, the major labels have now set a new kind of trap. They're licensing all right - only they're licensing on terms that screw new businesses.....

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs's annual Macworld surprise may be a slimmed-down laptop and a higher-capacity model of the iPhone.....

Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster and UBS AG's Benjamin Reitzes expect Jobs to capitalize on demand for the Mac by introducing a smaller, lighter version of Apple's MacBook notebooks. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst David Bailey anticipates a version of the iPhone with 16-gigabytes of storage, double the capacity of the current $399 device.

What do you get when you cross an iPod with a Mac?

A super-slim laptop that uses chip-based flash memory in place of a spinning hard drive, of course. If the rumors are right, Apple will unveil one at the annual Macworld confab next month.

Before you begin salivating from gadget lust however, be forewarned. The rumors should be taken with a grain of salt (or a whole tub of it if you have one handy) — and not just because Apple prognosticators have predicted for years that an ultra-light dream machine is right around the corner.

QuickBooks users that lost data as a result of the recent update fiasco are being offered free data recovery software.

According to MacFixIt, QuickBooks owners that notified Intuit that the contents of their desktop folder was destroyed by the flawed update process have received an email offering to reimburse the cost of a copy of Prosoft's Data Rescue II.

The email reportedly contains instructions for receiving the update.

From January, HP is to start selling Compaq PCs in Germany again - because it needs a downmarket brand to help it better compete with the local market leader Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC).

The alleged holy grail of a properly-coded browser is full adherence to prevailing Web standards. The developers of these applications all tout their performance and rendering accuracy, but we all know it’s not necessarily true.

Most of the time, when a reviewer probes a new product, the encounter is going to be short. Apple, for example, even gives its prime-time reviewers, such as my friend David Pogue of The New York Times, and Wall Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal, a limited advanced view of a new product before it has to be returned.

In an ideal world, we’d invite all our guests to appear in a single, professionally-equipped studio, so they’d all sound perfect, or as close to perfection as they could, in the fashion of a major network broadcast. But that’s just not possible, not even for the most popular talk shows on the planet.

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