iPod says no to Linux Sync
The latest iPods have a cryptographic “checksum” in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn’t exist — like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players.
Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy — this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware. I kept my iPod when I switched to Ubuntu Linux a year ago, and I’ve been using it happily with my machine ever since (though it took me a solid week to get all my DRMed Audible audiobooks out of iTunes — I had to run two machines 24/7, playing hundreds of hours of audio through a program called AudioHijack, to remove the DRM from my collection, which had cost me thousands of dollars to build). I’d considered buying another iPod when this one started to show its age — it’s a perfectly nice player to use, provided you stay away from the DRM.
At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file. If you try to do either of these, the hashes will not match and the iPod will report that it contains “0 songs” when the iTunesDB would otherwise be perfectly adequate.
Presumably finding a crack for this protection will become a prime target for coders looking for a challenge. I’m guessing most of them own ipods, and many of them run linux, or at least don’t use iTunes. Imagine the status of being the guy/girl who unshackled the world’s millions of ipods! I expect a working method within a few months, tops. Maybe a little longer depending on uptake of the 6G pods.
The sticky part will be implementation. With the DMCA being what it is, and most of the good music players based out of the US, few of them will want to risk criminal charges by building such ipod-accessibility into their software. Perhaps unsupported ipod-cracking add-ons will start circulating? Many good music players support winamp-style extensions, and in many cases that was how ipod support was first integrated into them.
Checksumming is NOT just being used to verify data integrity — if that were all, then the iPod wouldn’t report zero tracks if the checksums failed to match. The sum could be calculated using an easily-derived salt. In this case, the checksum is being calculated using a secret shared between the device and iTunes, in order to prevent clients that don’t share that secret from loading music onto the iPod. more
Technorati Tags: Blocked, Closed, iPod, Linux, Synching, Syncing
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testor Said,
September 17, 2007 @ 11:28 am
The Amarok team solved the situation for the moment, so “iPod says hello to linux” again