New IPods Lock Out Linux (For a Weekend)

When Apple released its new iPods a couple weeks back it was bad news for those that don’t like iTunes. The new Video Nano and others contained a significant change to way the iPod accepts loaded files, which broke many of the existing hacks that have worked for years. The main community affected by this […]

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When Apple released its new iPods a couple weeks back it was bad news for those that don't like iTunes. The new Video Nano and others contained a significant change to way the iPod accepts loaded files, which broke many of the existing hacks that have worked for years.

The main community affected by this change were Linux users, since there is no version of iTunes for Linux. Faced with a situation where your OS doesn???t work with your iPod which are you going to ditch? Actually that???s a trick question because the intrepid hackers have already solved the problem.

A post this morning on the ipodminusitunes site proclaims, ???we???ve won,??? and offers the following explanation:

Thanks to some inspired work by a few heroes, we???ve managed to work out how to get everything working again.

This is what we???ve found out: the hash at 0x58 is the one that matters. And we know how to generate it.

It???s a cryptographic signature combining data from the iTunesDB and a device specific identifier (called the firewireid) and some (formerly) secret numbers.

Instructions for linux users on how to fix their iTunesDB files are here. Windows users are going to have to wait a little while. (For interested programmers, the code to generate the hash is here.)

The heroes in question include wtbw, nopcode, teuf, simon and many others from #gtkpod.

Let???s all hope that (if they haven???t already from the iPhone unlocking) Apple learn that fighting against us is pointless. It???s a waste of their time if the open source crowd is going to get past it in just a weekend.

This is good new for fans of Amarok (which is so much better than iTunes it really isn???t funny), gtkPod and other alternative means of managing your iPod. As the above note mentions, there???s currently no solution for Windows programs like Anapod Explorer.

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