Apple's music news just keeps on getting better; now they've issued a press release reporting that the iTunes Music Store has officially sold over one million songs in its first week. Furthermore, "over half" of the tracks in the iTMS's entire 200,000-song catalog were downloaded at least once, and more than 50% of the songs sold were purchased as full albums. You want more, you say? Then toss in these fun facts: iTunes 4 has been downloaded over a million times; sales and orders of the new iPods have already topped 130,000; and over 3,200 new songs are slated to pop up in the iTMS sometime today. So are we tired enough to resort to using horrible clichés like "this is music to our ears"? Oh, my yes. Heck, we're tired enough at this point to let Anya finish up the episode on her Magna Doodle.

Well, okay, maybe not.

And yet, somehow we're not too tired to futz around with a calculator. Word got out last week that, at launch, the iTunes Music Store had sold 275,000 songs in the space of just eighteen hours; multiply that out for a whole year and it comes to an annual revenue of $132,495,000. But now we have a slightly more realistic rate to consider: a million songs in a week. A little more math reveals that if sales stick there, the iTMS will pull in $51,480,000. Still not too shabby, right?

There's just one teensy little problem: that's a drastic reduction in sales rate over the course of 6.25 days, and since two points define a line, it's therefore possible to consider the dropoff in sales rate between the first eighteen hours and the end of the first week as a linear function. Our sleep-deprived calculations therefore show that during all of Week 12, the iTunes Music Store will have sold... um... two songs. We could be way off base here, but we're guessing that a buck ninety-eight in gross weekly revenue probably isn't going to prompt any boastful press releases.

But hey, we're not going to let any brain-dead arithmetic spoil the party-- and apparently neither is anyone else, especially the folks on Wall Street. Did you happen to notice what went on with Apple's stock price yesterday? That sucker popped right through the roof, up $1.64 (that's over 11%!) to close at over $16 a share for the first time in probably six months. And it's all thanks to the music. We find it odd that investors couldn't care less when a computer company makes great computers, but suddenly start drooling all over themselves when the same computer company sells a bunch of Christina Aguilera tracks. Go figure.

So here's the thing; we're so completely out of the loop after our extended absence that there's absolutely no way we can possibly judge any Apple-related rumors based on known fact. As it turns out, though, that's actually sort of a blessing, since it affords us a luxury we haven't been able to experience in years: blind faith. And that's precisely how we're going to try to tackle the rumors that IBM's long-awaited PowerPC 970 is only a month or two away from shipping in a series of pro Macs whose performance makes the current G4s look like epitomes of sloth-- extremely stylish epitomes of sloth, but epitomes of sloth nonetheless.

Yup, blind faith. None of this point-by-point debunking of outrageous claims as in the case of the XtremMac or the iWalk, no cautious optimism based on a calculated weighing of known factors-- just guts-level belief. How hard can it be, right? Faithful viewer j tipped us off to the latest on this rumor over at MacBidouille; not only are the new 970-based Power Macs due as early as next month, but prerelease units are also kicking out benchmarks that'll singe your eyebrows off if you sit too close.

Get this: in a series of tests involving Photoshop, Bryce, and Cinema 4D, a single 1.4 GHz PPC 970 Mac beat out a dual-processor 1.4 GHz G4 system, as well as a 3 GHz Pentium 4-- and a dual 1.8 GHz 970 just about smacked the paint off of everything else. When these things ship, the single-processor 1.4 GHz model will be the new low-end system, meaning the Mac platform should finally have some serious horsepower to bring to the party. So, Mac fans, rejoice! As the English translation of MacBidouille's article states, "the fight is over and Apple will soon rule the world!" We're taking that as the literal truth, people! Apple will actually reign supreme over all nations!

Assuming, of course, you're willing to accept that no one in the industry has seen hide nor hair of these systems except, miraculously enough, this one French site-- and they somehow managed to get a hold of one in March running a prerelease version of Panther that didn't exist at the time and then sat down and compiled a series of benchmarks while dodging machine gun fire from the Apple wetworks task force assigned to guard it from anyone who's ever do much as heard of a Mac rumors site. But that's perfectly... um... reasonable...

Man, blind faith is hard. How do people do this?

Longtime viewers of this trashy little soap are well aware that we're perfectly happy to wander off-topic to engage in a little gleeful and petty gloating about the security flaw du jour afflicting all those poor saps running software slapped together by Microsoft. (Heck, it's one of the few hobbies we have left that isn't fattening, cancer-causing, or guaranteed to send us to hell.) Well, this time we've got something a little more relevant on deck: Apple's latest security hole. Da da da da dummmmmmm!

(That last bit there was an ominous chord, for those of you missed it.)

Yes, folks, faithful viewer Jonboy pointed us toward a WIRED article which describes an exploit that could have been used to compromise your Apple ID-- you know, that thing that lets you post soon-to-be-deleted obscenity-ridden rants to Apple's support forums, download developer tools from the Apple Developer Connection, and, most importantly in this context, make One-Click purchases from the Apple Store and the iTunes Music Store. Apparently somebody discovered that a little judicious cutting and pasting of data hidden in the HTML source of Apple's "Forgot Your Password?" page allowed him to reset the password of any Apple ID without needing to know anything except the victim's email address. Oops.

Now, before you go running off looking for details on how to pull this little stunt so you can score an iPod or six on someone else's dime, there are two things you should know. First of all, bad karma, man-- that's stealing, plain and simple, and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even considering such a thing. Secondly, Apple already fixed the bug. Don't ask us how we know. (Quit looking at us like that.)

Since an Apple ID account contains a user's credit card data, at first this exploit sounds pretty nasty, but it's not as bad as it could have been; while nefarious and new-iPod-less ne'er-do-wells could indeed have ordered up some gear using the stored credit card info, they couldn't have accessed the actual credit card data itself, and thus the damage would have been limited to Apple's stores. Since it's Apple's bug that would have led to the charges in the first place, we can't believe the company would try to hold the Apple ID holder liable-- and, of course, there's all sorts of legal protection for credit card users in the case of fraud. On top of that, Apple claims that no one ever exploited this bug in the first place. No harm, no foul.

Once we thought about it a bit longer, though, we came to the conclusion that this exploit was at least as heinous as all those Microsoft holes that are constantly letting through malicious viruses. Trashing our hard drives is something from which we could probably recover, but finding out that someone used our credit cards to buy eighty bucks' worth of Céline Dion and Faith Hill songs, well... there are some dark places in the corners of the soul from which a man may never return.