Online music database people Gracenote have issued a warning regarding digital music players that use Microsoft's Active X technology in order to access third party services, like Gracenote's own album tracklisting information service. The warning is that a flaw in Active X might allow hackers to access your PC - and therefore users should make sure they are running the most recent version of any affected digital music player, because the makers of those players have generally introduced systems to overcome the flaw.
To be honest I don't really follow any of this, nor do I really understand why it is news, because I'm pretty sure Gracenote first raised their Active X concerns back in June. I suspect it is in the news this week because Sony have just updated their Connect and SonicStage player software, and the new version overcomes the Active X problem, so they are keen to get their users to upgrade (not that I've ever met anyone that uses Sony's music player software, but presumably someone does somewhere, probably in Sony Corp HQ).
Gracenote stress that they are not aware of any users who have been affected by hackers utilising the Active X flaw - but it is, in theory, a risk, which means anyone using media players on a Windows machine should possibly make sure they are running the most recent version (though don't quote us on that, I'd check with a more knowledge IT person before doing anything drastic). No players on the Mac Operating System are affected because, as you all know, Macs, and more importantly, Mac users, are superior in every way.