Things are pretty quiet in Macville right now; after the recent crude file-deleting Word 2004 Trojan scare, most of what little drama is floating around out there seems to be centered on people wondering if every file they download will turn out to be something malicious with a fake icon and filename slapped on it. Personally, we have a feeling that if more exciting things were going on right now, fewer people would bother getting freaked out by the whole thing, since it was both artless and fairly limited in terms of casualty count. (Did anybody other than that one guy get nuked by it?) That said, we did just get bitten by a similar assault ourselves; we downloaded a file whose name and icon suggested that it was a leaked early beta version of The Sims™ Doin' Taxes, but which, to our horror, turned out to be Word 6.0 launching in Classic. AIIIEEEEEEEEE!!

Needless to say, we doubt we shall ever recover.

And yet we must press on, so how about we check in with the latest dirt on the prospects of the iTunes Music Store finally punching its way through U.S. borders to bring the promise of cheap 'n' legal music downloads to some of the non-yank masses? Apple's latest official word on the subject is that the European version of the store should be coming sometime "this year," but French site MacPlus claims to have a source with a slightly less vague target date. As far as we can make out from the Babelfish autotranslation (our French isn't nearly as atrocious as our German, but it's still basically limited to such tasks as, say, understanding most of an Eddie Izzard encore without peeking at a transcript), sources close to the major labels claim that Euro-iTMS "should be open towards mid-June, not only in France, but in several European countries," and in any case "before October" so as to beat the competition to market.

As for pricing, well, the news on that front is perhaps a little less cheery: "the price of the pieces was fixed at 1,29€," which is 1.29 euros with our more familiar use of the decimal point as opposed to the swanky French decimal comma. That works out to roughly a buck fifty-two in good ol' U.S. green-'n'-wrinklies, which is significantly more expensive than our own accustomed 99-cent downloads. From what we can make out, the higher price comes from stiffer licensing fees from the labels (0,80€, or 94 cents) and a scary 19.6% tax rate. Figure in Apple's costs to keep the store running and when all's said and done, it doesn't sound like the company's exactly going to get rich off the higher price. Well, especially if everyone in Europe decides that it's too high to pay in the first place, but even if they do line up with frothing mouths and open wallets, it sounds like the iTMS will continue to be a slightly-better-than-break-even prospect for some time to come.

Oh, and there's one more semi-startling bit of recon in this rumour: "less immediately obvious, the shop on line would also position on the lucrative market of the ringings of telephone." In other (slightly less-baffling) words, when it goes live, the Euro-iTMS will reportedly sell ringtones for mobile phones alongside those 700,000 songs. MacPlus seems to think that implies that a future iPod may include telephony features, but we're not exactly holding our breath, here. But even without a phonePod on the horizon, it does actually sound kinda funky that Euro-iTunes might be able to sell you a copy of "White Wedding" for your iPod and a matching ringtone for your Nokia or whatever right alongside it. All together, now: "Les sonneries de téléphone sont sur la chaise!"