iPod firmware reverse engineered
There’s more than one way to extract a bootloader, and Nils Schneider has come up with a rather
inspired one. He wanted to study
the iPod firmware in order to write new software for the device, but couldn’t examine the code without first somehow
extracting it. He ended up using a piezo element to output the firmware as a series of sounds, which he recorded and
analyzed on his PC to convert the squeaks and squawks into a digital representation of the code. He essentially turned
iPod and microphone into an acoustic modem, and wrote his own application to decode the signal. Then, he wrote it all
up for posterity and posted it online in contribution to hacker lore. Hats off to you, Nils!
[Thanks Brian for the tip!]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Marcello said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
How long until apple sue him?
m
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Jack said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Wow! An astoundingly creative hack! Even if he can't do anythng with it, the fact he got it via a hacked modem setup should earn him some credits.
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bsvec said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Old news.
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/29/2017244&tid=222&tid=176
They used the hack to boot linux off it!
http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page
b
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Jack said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
One month old might be old to some, but it's still news to the rest of us not on the bleeding edge of hacking.
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