I’m at a Residence Inn in Boston today, and just perused someone’s voicemail messages. I don’t need to say who’s messages they were, or their content but it was rather interesting. How did I do this? Well, nothing too hackerish or illegal. I actually listened to messages that someone decided to share out there.
This poor fool installed iTunes and let it be the default mp3 player on his machine. He also didn’t change his preferences to require a password, or not share his music. Which means that anyone on the same network as him, with iTunes running, can browse and listen to his whole library.
Where does the voicemail come in? It looks like he’s using one of those fancy services that sends you your voicemail message as an mp3 file. Or perhaps his corporate PBX does it. In any case, he downloads his voicemails on his computer, listens to them, and then they remain in his iTunes library.
And when he plugs into the network at the hotel, everyone with iTunes can see anything he’s got in his iTunes library. There was an interesting message from a company that wants to partner with his company that was 53 seconds long titled ‘20101251614511956509.’ Given that its now May, I wonder if that partnership took place.
I should look it up . . . in the mean time, make sure you’re machine isn’t sharing anything you don’t know about. I love Apple but they’re a little too ‘consumer friendly’ and definitely give IT departments a huge headache with things like this.
BTW – have you considered using Quest’s VAS to deploy out group policies to your employees’ Macs to stop them from using iTunes? You should!
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