John Dickinson

Spotify, one of the legal way to listen to music for free is a surprising breakthrough.  It not only allows people to listen to music at no cost to yourself, while continuing to line the pockets of Simon Cowell and other industry fat-cats, but means you can listen to an album without waiting for it to download.

The nice thing for us Linux users is that it works for the main part under Wine. The excellent compatibility layer for Linux that enables the running of windows software.  The amusing twist is that although the music plays, and the audio adverts play whenever deemed appropriate by the powers that be, the banner advertising doesn’t quite function.  I mean, the banners display perfectly, it is only when you come to click on one that you come unstuck.

So I suppose for most people, this wont be an issue, but just think if the record companies, or more importantly the Advertisers get wind of this.  There could be trouble afoot!  I suppose the Linux user base is probably going to be a very (very) small minority.  But this could have the knock-on effect that the advertisers scratch the banners in favour of the more reliable audio adverts.  This could be very annoying for the end user.  Possibly driving newly converted pirates back to their old Torrent friend.

If you would like a nice shiny SVG version of the Spotify Icon, for use with Gnome/KDE/Xfce/etc. you can get it here:
http://kallepersson.se/upl/spotify.svg

There is a security hole that may be effecting thousands of 1&1 customers.

The bug/hole is as follows:

On ANY microsoft shared hosting site with 1&1, navigate to the home page, e.g. “http://www.1and1.co.uk/”.
Amend the URL to add a non-existant asp file with Get variables applied that include “;” or “%3B” (the escape/encoded version of the character).
i.e. “http://www.1and1.co.uk/qwerty.asp?;”

-Obviously replace “1and1.co.uk” with your domain name.
Hey presto, you get a listing of all files and folders in the sites root directory!

It should show a 404 error, but instead shows the directory.

Not a huge problem, but may expose sensitive files and any non public directories for potential hackers to probe.