DaveO -

You can have ActiveX installed, and turned off except when you want to allow it temporarily for a specific site, at least with WinXP and IE6 or IE7. I agree on it being somewhat hazardous, so you'll have to make the call on whether to let it in at all. It probably is no more hazardous than Flash or QuickTime, etc., if you keep a tight rein on it.

This new tune program appears to be an new effort at "pattern recognition" in music. Quite a lot is being done in this area, but relatively little is "ready for prime time" so far as I've seen. The hang-up has been in having a database of tunes indexed by the patterns they contain.

A somewhat similar venture, for images, is at Polar Rose, where they plan to release a beta program "soon" in which you can show the program a picture of a person and it will search the entire internet for pictures of the same person.

er... that is ... as soon as they've indexed the entire internet, which they're just starting to do.

It also promises to be able to find all the pictures of a given person on your own machine by recognizing the images, which seems like a more reasonable goal at present.

John