Old Man Yells at Cloud

Did a large procession wave their
torches as my head fell in the basket,
and was everybody dancing on the casket?
Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do.

I’ve had my credit card information stolen twice. Both times, it was because of iTunes.

The second time, it happened right after I told the folks at Apple that my credit card information had been stolen and that they should cancel any pending orders on my account before I put my new credit card information in.

I put it in.

Someone immediately spent $50 on my account. (So to hear some of the latest things being said about Apple being a champion of user security want to make me laugh out loud.)

Since then, I refused to put credit card information into iTunes, and that made it unhappy. Even if I wanted a free app, it wasn’t happy. And because I was not put on Earth to make software applications happy, I wasn’t bothered.

So to hear that Apple is pulling the plug on iTunes? Well, not that bothered.

And I’m not that bothered to rush out to use any of their replacement products either. Because their customer service through iTunes convinced me they weren’t all that interested in keeping my information private, or even listening to me when I thought things were vulnerable. And before you ask, yes, I do practice good password security. No two passwords are the same. Hardly any of my usernames are the same. Nevertheless . . .

And thus the They Might Be Giants lyric. I’m dancing on their casket. Even though iTunes is coming back as a bifurcated zombie.

And, of course, it’s not really dead. At least for Windows users.

Which means it’s imperfect – because iTunes has always been imperfect – for my needs. Any schlub moving on to its replacements will have to pay a monthly fee for the privilege.

Not that I used iTunes all that much. The free app was so my daughter could get her Fitbit working with her iPhone. And pretty much all the music I had catalogued there was ripped from CDs.

Call me funny, but I’m not a fan of streaming media. I want to know that I actually own what I’ve purchased. You don’t see stores or record executives coming to my house to physically remove the CDs I have. Yet that kind of thing is all too easy with “the cloud.”

So yes, this comes: