WARNING: while this scene does concern iPod sales in Korea, it contains absolutely no humorously incomprehensible computer-generated English translations of Korean text. We know, it's tragic, but it happens. If you're only here for the goofy autotranslations, you may want to move on to avoid massive disappointment. You have been warned.

Okay, so now that that's out of the way, remember when we were shocked, appalled, and yes, even flabbergasted (and we all know how painful that can be) to learn that, despite leading the market globally, Apple's iPod had at most a 3 percent market share in that mysterious land known as Korea? Actually, some sources reported Apple's slice of the pie over there to be a wafer-thin "less than 1 percent," a fact so mind-blowing in its sheer incongruity that Apple Korea apparently got a little disoriented. So disoriented, in fact, that it did a most un-Apple-like thing: it launched a price war by slashing iPod prices to unseemly new lows. Sure, said war ended abruptly a few days later when the company came to its senses, but the fact that Apple got pulled into it at all speaks volumes about just how distressingly unpopular the iPod was with music-loving Koreans looking for a way to stuff a wad o' digital songs in their pockets.

Well, good news: faithful viewer Simone Manganelli tipped us off to an article in The Korea Herald (which is the country's "No. 1 English Newspaper," hence no incomprehensible Google autotranslation) which reports that the iPod family is finally catching on in Korea after all. According to sales data compiled by a single Korean online electronics reseller, in the first half of this month, iPods of various flavors comprised a whopping 7 percent of the market by revenue-- which the reseller estimates to be "well over 10 percent" in terms of unit sales (presumably since iPods are, on average, more expensive than other players). From less than 1 percent to over 10? Now that's a turnaround, baby.

You get three guesses as to what's responsible for pumping up iPod sales in Korea, and the first four don't count. Yes, folks, it's the iPod shuffle to the rescue; if reports were correct that Apple only released the shuffle to help spread the iPod brand through flash-happy Asia, evidently that strategy is already paying off big. Faithful viewer John Blackburne points out that, according to The Korea Times (in English once more; curses, foiled again!), Samsung aims to steal the MP3 player crown from Apple by 2007, but with Apple gaining ground in Samsung's home country, that might be a little tricky; after all, it takes a lot more than a blowhard CEO spouting tough talk to beat Apple. Just look at Singapore's Creative Technology; its Napoleonic CEO "declared war" on the iPod last November, but according to Bloomberg, its shares are now trading at their lowest levels in eight months. War is, as they say, H-E-double-hockey-sticks. Let's just leave it at that.

Okay, okay, you're right-- a scene about Korean iPod sales that doesn't feature a ludicrously poor autotranslation seems like a crime against all that's good and decent in this world. So just to keep the universe from collapsing in on itself, we've decided to translate a random sentence from the first article into Korean, and then back into English. Behold: "Apple Computer also recently released its first flash-memory-based MP3 player, the iPod Shuffle, which is sold for 125,400 won" becomes "The Apple the computer mixes up and the mp3 bow which recently puts it first flash flag hundred million foundation, for 125,400 where it wins sale toy the iPod to release, it put." Happy now?

Boy howdy, can we call 'em, or can we call 'em? Just yesterday we predicted that the alternative (and DRM-free) iTunes Music Store interface PyMusique, newly hobbled by Apple, would rise again as soon as the programmers could scrounge up ten minutes to work around whatever Apple had changed to block it; not a day later, faithful viewer Reefdog informs us that, as reported by Engadget, PyMusique is indeed back in action. Let the epic game of Code Ping-Pong™ continue!

The only thing that surprises us about this is that, so far, no antivirus company has seized upon PyMusique's return from the dead as a shining example of Apple's inherent insecurity and the imminent viral doom awaiting all Mac users who don't immediately shell out crazy ducats to protect their systems. After all, faithful viewer Moogintroll informs us that, according to ZDNet UK, Symantec is "warning that Apple's OS X operating system is increasingly becoming a target for hackers and malware authors"-- without actually producing a single example of a Mac OS X virus, of course, but hey, that's totally irrelevant. The important thing is that, "contrary to popular belief, the Macintosh operating system has not always been a safe haven from malicious code." What? Oh no! Suddenly we feel Fearful! And a little Uncertain! And we may even be experiencing the faintest twinge of Doubt!

Why do we get the feeling that Agents have cut the hard line and bricked over all the windows? Maybe because this is the exact sort of "security through obscurity" FUD that another antiviral company (Sophos) tried to spook us with two years ago: the notion that Macs are no more inherently secure than Wintels, and as soon as there are enough Mac users to represent a large enough target, the virus-writers will strike and we'll all be even worse off than the Windoids because we'll be so woefully unprepared. Unfortunately, that claim kindasorta completely ignores the fact that Mac OS X is more inherently secure than Windows-- maybe less so now than before XP got Service Pack 2, but those in the know (at least, the ones who aren't trying to sell you Mac antivirus software) generally agree that several aspects of Mac OS X-- needing an admin password to install system-modifying software, for example-- do, in fact, make it tougher to write a successful virus for our happy lil' platform than for Windows.

But here's Symantec, making spooky "Ooooooo" noises while waving its hands at that Opener rootkit that does nasty things when installed on a compromised system-- without showing a single way in which a Mac could be remotely compromised to run Opener in the first place. Symantec harps on the "37 serious vulnerabilities" previously found in Mac OS X, while conveniently neglecting to mention that few, if any, of those vulnerabilities could be exploited by a stranger over the Internet like so many Windows holes can... or that, unless we missed something big (which we admit is quite possible), none of the Mac holes-- all long since patched-- had ever resulted in even a single real-life exploit outside of a lab.

Not that we're denying the central point, here; sure, if Apple gains market share, there's a greater likelihood that evildoers will try to mess with us. But that's a far cry from the Windowsesque spiral into spyware, viruses, and madness that Symantec and Sophos seem so fond of hinting at in order to separate Mac users from their wallets. Not one virus; not one exploit; gee, it must be time to panic!

Remember, kiddies, a healthy paranoia is always a useful thing to carry around, but keep it in perspective. Mac OS X may not be 100 percent hackproof, but it isn't just more obscure than Windows; it really is fundamentally more secure. And the next time you feel like buying into that whole "Windows isn't less secure, it's just more popular" argument, take an Analogy Trip and ask yourself these related questions: 1) How many worms, especially really nasty ones that ground the entire planet to a sludgy halt, have propagated by attacking and spreading via Microsoft's web server software? 2) How many more web sites run the open source Apache software instead of Microsoft's? And 3), now that you've established that Apache is loads more popular than Microsoft's IIS (and always has been), how many crippling Apache worms have made the evening news in the past decade or so?

Just something to think about.

In our experience, high school has always been about the systematic crushing of individual freedoms as fitting preparation for the soul-killing experiences of Life in the Real World, so we can certainly understand the dehumanizing random locker checks, the arbitrary and homogenizing dress codes, the pointless busywork, and all that stuff; after all, why wait to have your spirit annihilated in the workforce when you can get it out of the way nice and early? But a school in Sydney, Australia may have just gone one big step way too far over the line when it comes to stripping away the basic human rights of its students: it's gone and banned iPod use during class hours. The fiends!

It's true, folks; faithful viewer daihong dished us a Sydney Morning Herald article which reports that the principal of International Grammar School decided to nix 'Pods in the classrooms because playing them too loud can damage one's hearing, because they're a "security risk" (oh, geez, not that ol' saw again-- suppose she banned keyring flash drives, too?), and because "students using iPods could not hear teachers." (News flash: if the kids are listening to iPods in class, they're not trying to hear the teachers, and taking away their 'Pods isn't going to change that.) But the biggest reason, she says, is because iPods "allow students to avoid communication with others and may lead to social isolation or escape from our community."

Well, duh! That's what makes them so great! But Principal Murphy (and you can just picture her grinning in an infuriatingly bubbly fashion when she says this) insists that "it's important for kids to be talking to one another at school, socializing and being part of a community. That's why they come to school, to be connected." My, how... June Cleaver of her. Meanwhile, the students are reportedly a little miffed, since they weren't consulted before the ban (get used to it, kids) and now they can't listen to music during lunch or use it to block out distractions when they need to get actual work done in the typical zoolike high school environment. But oh, no; listening to his or her own music might make someone less of a People Person, and that would be a tragedy of the highest order.

From an academic standpoint, International Grammar School serves as an interesting counterpoint to Duke University, who, as you know, gave free iPods to each and every member of its Class of 2008. (Duke is obviously far less concerned about iPod-related social isolation among its students, possibly because of their ready access to alcoholic beverages.) While International Grammar contends that its students have no legitimate need for iPods in the classroom (what about iSynced iCal appointments and Notes?), Duke is going out of its way to incorporate iPod-integrated teaching methods into as many courses as possible. And based on what little we've heard, the current situation reads something like "Duke students happy, International Grammar ones not so much."

But hey, high school is supposed to suck the dimples off a golf ball. And if having their beloved iPods torn from their grasp without so much as a "please" is teaching these kids to mistrust authority at every step of the journey, well, then that's a skill they can use for the rest of their cubicle-jockey lives. Who says that high school's lessons are no longer relevant?