Playing the iPod's Firmware

Nils Schneider is one of the hackers working on the iPodLinux project that is attempting to bring the open-source operating system Linux to the iPod. Nils's fourth-generation iPod is not currently supported by the project, but he's documented a pretty amazing story of how he and some others managed to reverse engineer the 4G iPod's bootloader code.

Essentially, Nils programmed his iPod to beep the 1s and 0s of the code, recorded the sound as it slowly "played" its bootloader and then decoded the results. It took several trys, but their persistence paid off in the end. [Via Engadget]

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