Shakira, Celine, J-Lo mess with Macs

COMPUTER FIRM Apple has gone to the lengths of producing an advice page for people who are unwary enough to stick protected audio disks into their Apple Macs.

Copy protected disks may not be ejectable without extraordinary measures, Apple warns.

The problems happen when disks which on the face of it look like ordinary CDs are put into CD-ROM drives on Macintoshes.

Although record companies have removed the "CD" logo, and have a warning that they're not suitable for either PCs or Macs, apparently sticking these items into Apple machines mean they could be hanging round doing nothing for quite some time.

Apple says that Shakira's "Laundry Service", Jello's "J To Tha L-O", and Celine Dion's "A New Day has Come" can all cause the freeze up problem, and states that the copy protection technology used on the audio disks can prevent them being ejected.

The firm also says other record companies, including Sony, are releasing products using the copy protection, presumably in a bid to stop people making illegal copies.

Here's the Apple page.

Course, if the record companies are trying to catch real pirates out, they're already well aware of all of this tomfoolery. But innocent users may well be caught unwares trying to listen to their J To Tha L-O... µ