You know, you UK people, we love ya like pancakes, but honestly, can't you tell some of your more uptight countryfolk to unclench and give it a rest, already? Remember, guys, we sympathized completely when it seemed like Apple was out to get you, what with the rampant layoffs and canceled OS localizations and backing out of London Mac trade shows every ten or twelve minutes. So we were willing to overlook that little bit of business with banning Apple's Power Mac commercial on the basis that the G5 might conceivably not be "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer." Funny how whoever complained didn't much seem to mind the implication that a G5 can blow a mostly-grown man clear through several walls of a house without causing any apparent injury other than some black stuff on the face and a funny hairstyle; still, like we said, the UK's been slighted by Apple before, so we let it drop.

But now things are just getting ugly. Apple fought for probably well over a year to bring the iTunes Music Store to the UK, but apparently some members of the local populace aren't all that impressed; faithful viewer Adam Buckley was the first of a gazillion people to send us a link to a BBC News article which reveals that the UK Consumer's Association is all in a snit over iTMS pricing. According to the association, 79 pence a pop (roughly $1.42 in "Bloody Colonials" currency) is just too darn expensive-- specifically, it's 20% more expensive than Apple charges per song in France and Germany, and that's allegedly a violation of European Union "single market" rules, which require that goods be sold at uniform pricing throughout all EU countries. Therefore, the association was gone whining to the Office of Fair Trading (we're guessing Better Business Bureau meets FTC) to investigate.

In a strictly technical sense, Apple might well be able to argue that the song it sells to a German customer is not the same as the song it sells to a UK one; sure, they might sound identical, but from a wholesale procurement standpoint, since the songs themselves are currently licensed to Apple on a per-country basis for sale only locally by the record labels in each country, Apple has different licensing costs and terms wherever it wants to open up shop. In other words, Apple couldn't sell, for example, an iTMS France track in the UK even if it wanted to; the French songs are licensed for French consumption only. We don't know how the EU rules are worded, but the truth of the matter is that Apple is not just selling the same item in two countries and charging two different prices. If it were that simple to sell digital music, 1) the iTMS would have the same catalog in each country (which it most certainly does not) and 2) the iTMS would be everywhere on the globe by now. Yes, even Canada.

So if anything, these consumer watchdog groups with too much time on their hands should be siccing the EU on the record labels for not licensing their catalogs for sale across the continent. Nevertheless, here's Phil Evans of the Consumers' Association, following his appeal to the OFT to smack Apple down for "overcharging" the Brits: "If the OFT agrees it will be another example of the rip-off culture that the British public are often victims of." Oh, "waaah waaah waaah, we're all victims here." C'mon, Phil-- to quote Basil Fawlty, is that what made Britain great?

Maybe once the pan-European iTMS gets underway next month this whole matter will be moot anyway, since every EU country will apparently be able to buy any iTMS Europe song for 99€, and we'd imagine that, despite the currency difference, that should include the UK (who otherwise would have no business harping on about EU trade rules). In the meantime, everyone who has a problem with iTMS pricing and absolutely zero appreciation of how many flaming legal hoops Apple has had to jump through in all these countries to get something as cool as the iTMS running in the first place should probably just go back to making their own music by banging rocks against hollow logs while wailing.

Will wonders never cease? Apple said that the iMac G5 would ship in mid-September; well, spin our vowels and call us Vanna, because here we are smack-dab in the middle of the month, and darned if people aren't indeed receiving stock-config iMacs that they preordered shortly after the product's Philnote debut! Could it be that when Phil Schiller mentions a ship date, he means that actual date, and not a later one parsed through a Jobsian verbal time dilation filter? Apparently there are benefits to getting a keynote delivered by a native Earth life form now and again.

So, yeah, iMac G5s are already dotting the landscape, and one of the cool side effects of that happy scenario is the appearance of some quick 'n' dirty benchmarks of the actual shipping systems. MacRumors has posted the Cinebench and Xbench scores submitted by a couple of lucky readers whose models had just arrived, and reportedly the stock 1.8 GHz units score a 243 and a 134.71, respectively. So should you get excited over the new iMac's performance? Well, uh, that depends on which numbers you look at.

See, according to Bare Feats, a dual-processor 1.42 MHz Power Mac G4 scores a 247 in Cinebench, so considering that Apple's new single-processor consumer system matches the performance of the company's fastest pro-grade desktop from just over a year ago at a fraction of the price, we think that's pretty spiffy. (Remember, a 20-inch 1.8 GHz iMac G5 costs $1,899; last year a dual 1.42 GHz Power Mac G4 plus a 20-inch Cinema Display cost a hair under four grand.) Better still, a single-processor 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5 scored a 251, which means that the iMac is certainly comparable in Cinebench performance to its aluminum-clad big brother.

But the Xbench score of only 134 is perhaps a little more troubling. Apple's G4-based PowerBooks have scored in that range; shouldn't a 1.8 GHz G5 beat out a 1.5 GHz-or-less G4? Well, here's the thing: benchmarks are... um... unreliable, we suppose might be one way to put it. Another way would be to say that they suck-- some more than others, and Xbench probably belongs in the "more" category. A quick glance at an Xbench comparison site shows a couple of 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5s-- you know, with the fast bus and high-speed RAM-- also scoring between 125 and 146, while some aluminum PowerBooks score in the 130s. If Xbench is trying to tell us that a Power Mac G5, an iMac G5, and a PowerBook G4 are all neck and neck (and neck) performance-wise, we're just not buying it.

As it turns out, Xbench scores can fluctuate wildly between successive benchmarking runs, and they're also very sensitive to available RAM. (The iMac in question was Xbenched with its stock 256 MB of RAM, so it was almost certainly gagging for more.) So we wouldn't put much stock in the Xbench numbers-- or even the Cinebench ones, for that matter. Because what really matters is real-world performance, and thankfully, the customer who submitted the original set of scores posted a glowing early performance review.

It seems that this guy has his own real-world benchmarking tools that measure how a given Mac will perform at his business, doing the actual tasks they'll be expected to do on the job; the iMac G5 repeatably scores a .948, with 1.0 being a single-processor 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5. Combine that fact with words and phrases like "ecstatic," "amazing," "beautiful," and "quite snappy even with 256 MB" and we think Apple's got at least one very happy customer.

It'll be a while before enough iMac G5s are in the field for a clear picture of their relative performance to emerge, but based on this very early testing, it sounds like cramming a G5 into a two-inch-thick screen (without nine fans and four independent thermal zones) didn't cramp its style much. So if you've been drooling at the new iMacs but concerned about the performance, so far it looks like you don't have much to worry about. Well, other than trying to figure out where you're going to get $1,799 for a 20-incher...

Well, we were planning on holding off on this until Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day this Friday, but what the heck-- it's a slow news day and this is just too much fun to pass up. Remember about ten years ago when "regular people" were just starting to get plugged into this new-fangled "Internet" thing, and emailed virus hoaxes preyed mercilessly upon the sad lack of technical understanding that often characterized the boatloads of AOL subscribers disgorged unceremoniously onto the scene? "Don't open any message with a subject line of 'I LOVE CLAMATO,'" they shouted, "or you will be instantaneously infected with a virus that will GIVE YOUR COMPUTER LYME DISEASE!!!" Or "whatever you do, if you're surfing the web and see a picture of Anna Kournikova shucking oysters [there was a big mollusk theme to all these, you recall], run away quickly because your computer will BURST INTO FLAME and BOTH YOUR ARMS WILL FALL OFF!!!" Ah, good times.

See, the more technically-inclined among us knew full well that simply reading an email message couldn't pass along a computer virus, and neither could the act of looking at an image on a web site, whether it depicted tennis stars and bivalves or not. The only way to catch a virus via email was to open an infected document that was sent as an attachment, and the only way to get one from a web site was to download and open a file carrying the bug. Simply reading mail or surfing the 'net was safe as houses-- at least, it was until Microsoft decided to change all the rules.

Sometime in the late '90s, a new crop of viruses did manage to spread themselves all over creation by simply coaxing recipients to read an email message; Microsoft's Outlook mail application apparently rendered embedded HTML and even executed embedded scripts by default, which led to all sorts of fun for Windows users. Suddenly it was that whole "you can't catch a virus by reading an email message" thing that had become the hoax. (Thanks, Redmond!) And guess what? Now you can catch a virus by looking at a picture, too! Woo-hoo!

Well, at least you can if you're running Windows and you haven't patched your system for the sixty-gazillionth time this year yet. Faithful viewer Mike Scherer dished us a CNET article about a buffer overflow vulnerability in Microsoft's core JPEG-rendering code that "could let attackers create an image file that would run a malicious program on a victim's computer as soon as the file is viewed." While no exploits or proof-of-concept examples have yet been spotted on the 'net, security wonks warn that "the potential is very high for an attack," in part because the code that contains the flaw "affects various versions of at least a dozen Microsoft software applications and operating systems," so even if you've patched your copy of Windows, you might be running, say, an unpatched version of Visio on top of it that's still vulnerable to attack.

In the interest of fairness (it's not Friday quite yet, you understand), we should probably mention that even the Mac was susceptible to a similar buffer-based vulnerability (since fixed) that lived in its code for displaying PNG graphics. But PNG isn't ubiquitous like JPEG is, and is used for far fewer pictures of Ms. Kournikova. If nothing else, isn't it a kick in the pants to see how old email hoaxes are coming true? Heck, in five more years, maybe Bill Gates will give us all a thousand bucks and a free copy of Longhorn (assuming it's shipping by then-- burn!!) just for forwarding his email. Why, the future's never looked brighter!