Just a quickie, here, folks-- hands up, who remembers MyTunes? For the slightly less obsessed, here's a refresher: not terribly long after iTunes for Windows appeared, someone wrote a bit of software that hooks into iTunes itself and records music streams into local MP3 copies saved to the hard drive. The upshot is that iTunes's sharing feature, which lets you listen to the songs of other iTunes users sharing their libraries on the same local network, could be used to copy songs instead of just listening to them. You could just hear all that character corroding before your very ears.

Now, technically, MyTunes wasn't really all that big a deal; all it did was record a song playing through iTunes, which means that it couldn't be used to copy someone's protected iTunes Music Store purchases unless the MyTunes computer was authorized to play the music in the first place. And it's not like audio stream recorders didn't exist before, on all sorts of platforms (take WireTap, for example); it's just that MyTunes tied itself so closely to iTunes that it grabbed a bit of press and probably made Apple a little nervous. (Remember, Steve had to work hard to convince the record labels that licensing their music to Apple was a good idea, and something like MyTunes might panic some of the less tech-savvy suits.)

Why are we bringing this up again now, you ask? Well, interestingly enough, CNET reports that MyTunes has "all but vanished from the Net, and its programmer's sites have gone dark." Was it the RIAA going lawsuit-happy again? Or maybe Apple's lawyers making with the cease-and-desist mojo? Nope; MyTunes is gone because its author, Bill Zeller, didn't keep backups: "he simply lost the source code in a catastrophic computer crash." Since his code is now wending its way up to that Great Bitbucket in the Sky, Bill says there "won't be any updates" because he "[doesn't] want to rewrite it."

How inconvenient-- for Bill, at least. But if you're the paranoid type, you might find it a little too coincidental that Bill's hard disk went kablooey just as he was "about to release the second version." Sounds to us like Apple may have dispatched a tactical ninja or two to "encourage" Bill's little storage malfunction. Such a shame... that poor hard drive never hurt a fly. Then again, it was running Windows, so maybe it was grateful to be put out of its misery.

The moral of the story? If you're writing software that Apple might one day deem "strategically disadvantageous," you really should be keeping offsite backups of all your source code in a ninja-resistant fire vault. And don't skimp on the ninjaproofing. Just how do you think the Windows source code bled out all over the 'net? They move like shadows, people. Shadows!