Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Reverse engineering by listening

Nils Schneider wanted to install Linux in his iPod. The problem is that iPod's bootloader, the software that starts up the system, is not accessible directly. What he did is he "played" the bootloader code. He then decoded the sequence of clicks that iPod produced. It took him 20 hours to reverse engineer the whole bootloader software.

He is now running Linux in his iPod. This effort paves a way for people to develop other software applications that will run on iPods.

-- Looks like these people have nothing else to do. :)

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