Hoooo mama! After chowing down on the release of the iPod Photo and the iPod U2 Special Edition at last week's big media event, the Apple world is apparently still snoozing in a post-Stevenote digestive torpor-- and as if things weren't quiet enough, everyone's been distracted by the election and then by the end of the election. The upshot is that there's so little Apple-related drama to go around that we aren't so much scraping the bottom of the barrel as we are punching straight through it and tunneling to China with the spoon. Honestly, we considered simply closing up shop for the day because there's really nothing important to say.

Of course, that's never stopped us before, so here we are, yammering on about something as earth-shattering as how Apple has disabled iTunes Music Store access from all but the latest three releases of iTunes. Oooooo. It's like they're harvesting black market organs from crippled orphans or something.

It's true, though; would we make such a serious accusation without proof? Well, yeah, of course we would, but it just so happens that CNET confirms it: as of now, only iTunes versions 4.5 and higher can access the nickel-and-dime bankruptcy machine known colloquially as the iTMS. This comes as a massive shock to anyone who 1) is still using iTunes 4.0 through 4.2 for some reason, and 2) didn't happen to notice Apple's warning about the impending change, which hassled anyone connecting to the iTMS with a soon-to-be-shut-out version of iTunes as of a couple of weeks ago.

Apple's stated intention in forcing users of older software to upgrade is to keep them in sync with new features only available in later versions, like iMix, those snazzy mosaic jewelcase inserts, and Party Shuffle (which, despite its name, is a feature that even wallflower loners like us no longer think we can live without). But since practically every release of iTunes disables the legally sketchy third party music liberation software du jour, the phrase "ulterior motive" springs readily to mind. For instance, last week's iTunes 4.7, in addition to adding iPod Photo support, iTMS Artist Alerts, and a way to find and prune duplicate songs, also just happens to kill iPodDownload, a plugin that allowed users to drag music from a connected iPod back to the iTunes Library-- a handy feature, to be sure, but also a potential way to steal music that's just a little too well-integrated with iTunes itself for Apple's comfort. So in addition to shutting down the plugin's original download site with threats of legal action, Apple decided to prevent it from working at all in iTunes 4.7.

But you know how these things go: squelch one download site and watch three more spring up, disable one version of software and watch a new one hit the servers before you can say "cheesy workaround." And indeed, according to MacMinute, iPodDownload 1.1 just popped up, offering full compatibility with iTunes 4.7-- and then popped right back down again, with the download link disappearing from Engadget in record time. (Apple's lawyers apparently possess that oh-so-enviable quality known as "cat-like reflexes.")

Not that they can actually stop anyone from obtaining and using iPodDownload if they really want to, mind you. As we've mentioned in the past, we're partial to the feature set and elegance of iPodRip, ourselves, but for anyone who's determined to use iPodDownload, a simple Google search will probably turn up a few live download links to the plugin itself, and even using the older 1.0 version with the iPodDownload-blocking iTunes 4.7 is a walk in the park for anyone with a hex editor and the mental wherewithal to change one letter in the plugin's name. You know what that means: bring on the lawyers and iTunes 4.8. Ahhh, nothing fills dead air quite like a futile game of cat and mouse...