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Palm Pre "iTunes Hack" Detailed By DVD Jon

Posted by timothy on Thu Jun 04, 2009 12:32 PM
from the role-playing-game dept.
Handhelds Cellphones Media Media (Apple) Hardware
CNETNate writes "As the reviews of the Palm Pre start to roll in, DVD Jon expands on previous coverage of the Pre showing up in iTunes as some sort of an iPod, by publishing the offending code Palm has used to enabled the feature. As suspected, in regular USB mode, the phone addresses itself as a standard peripheral. But in 'Media Sync' mode, it claims to be an iPod ... from a vendor known as Apple."
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story

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[+] Technology: Palm Pre To Sync Seamlessly With iTunes 178 comments
Wired is reporting that Palm's new handheld device, the Pre, will be able to sync automagically with Apple's iTunes. Thanks to a team of ex-Apple engineers the Pre will sync everything but iPhone applications and some of the older Fairplay DRM music. "It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you'll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync. This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don't be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting."
Submission: Palm Pre 'iTunes hack' detailed by DVD Jon by CNETNate (1469133)
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  • How Long Before Apple Files a Lawsuit? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kipin (981566) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:39PM (#28212103) Homepage
    I can't imagine a major competitor to the Apple iPhone will be allowed to do this without a lawsuit smacking them in the face. Then again, perhaps Palm wants a lawsuit to bring additional media attention to their device.

    Seems like a risky move by Palm, their entire future most likely rests on this device. Without it succeeding the risk of Palm going under are pretty high. Might as well shoot for the fences I guess.
    • I very much doubt this was orchestrated in order to gain publicity. Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by a rogue engineer who wanted his phone to work with iTunes.

    • Re:How Long Before Apple Files a Lawsuit? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chaos Incarnate (772793) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:53PM (#28212317) Homepage
      They may be hit with a lawsuit, but if Palm did their job right, they'll escape scot-free same as Compaq did in the early '80s.

    • Umm... why the fuss? (Score:5, Informative)

      by exhilaration (587191) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:56PM (#28212367)
      Why would Apple sue over this? On what grounds? There's no copy protection being circumvented, no cryptography being broken, it's a plaintext response. Also remember when that when Apple suggested legal trouble [boingboing.net] for Palm, Palm suggested that they wouldn't hesitate to strike back [boingboing.net] with their own patent portfolio. I can't see either party taking anything to court.

              • Re:Umm... why the fuss? (Score:4, Interesting)

                by ckaminski (82854) <ckaminskiNO@SPAMpobox.com> on Thursday June 04 2009, @04:21PM (#28215143) Homepage
                Okay, I'm a developer, and the phones environment is pretty snazzy these days. But here's pretty much what I have for choices.

                My needs:
                    Tethering, Music (ghetto iPod), Skye (maybe), custom app development.

                AT&T:

                    Blackberry Curve 8900 - no touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, SD card
                    iPhone - Touchscreen, no QWERTY keyboard

                Verizon:

                    Palm Centro - WinMo (ick) - QWERTY, SD card, Touchscreen
                    Blackberry Storm - no QWERTY, no touchscreen, SD card

                TMo

                    Blackberry Curve 8900
                    Android G1 -> qwerty keyboard, touchscreen, sd card
                    Sidekick XL

                Sprint:

                    Palm Treo 800/750: qwerty, touchscreen, sd card
                    Palm Pre : Touchscreen, qwerty, sd card?

                I *LIKE* the BB/Treo keyboard styles, so landscape style keyboards kind of ruin the experience for me. After playing with a G1 last night, I'm not convinced. I think it's come down to a WinMo treo, BB 8900, or the Pre if I like how it feels.

                I've been a Verizon customer for 12 years. I love my service - I'm loath to leave, but Verizon has been on the shit-end of the smartphone arena for too long.
                 

  • Antitrust? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz (556486) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:39PM (#28212115) Homepage

    Apple could sue, and Palm could counter-sue with antitrust claims. After all, Apple does control most of the music market via iTunes.

    I vaguely recall a lawsuit where Apple was sued for limiting the iPod to only iTunes (Apple won), but I don't think anybody has challenged the reverse (using something else with iTunes) in court.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by larry bagina (561269)
      Apple isn't doing anything (illegal or otherwise) to interfere or prevent other online music stores from operating. iTunes popularity is due to brand loyalty, mind share, convenience, and being first.

      • Re:Antitrust? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Albanach (527650) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:01PM (#28212433) Homepage

        In order to gain a successful antitrust verdict you need to be something of a monopoly (which iTunes and more generally Apple clearly isn't)

        What makes you say that? A quick google search shows most sites estimate iTunes market share as between 50% and 70% of the legal downloads market. That's comfortably enough for most regulators to consider it a monopoly.

        Of course being a monopoly isn't illegal. It only becomes a problem when you try to use your monopoly in one area to create or expand a monopoly in another. Say like taking a monopoly in digital music sales and using it to help a monopoly in digital music players? Maybe or maybe not. Still, I'd be hesitant to describe Apple's digital music business as something other than a monopoly.

        • Re:Antitrust? (Score:5, Informative)

          by bennomatic (691188) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:09PM (#28212531) Homepage
          With the removal of DRM, there's no issue of monopoly whatsoever. 70% of the market is not 100% of the market; a clever player who can work a deal could get in and take over a big chunk of that.

          The only issue before was the fact that anything you bought on the ITMS would only work on the iPod. While that sort of software-hardware vendor lock-in still does not constitute a monopoly--there are other stores that work with other devices--the removal of DRM means that you can buy from ITMS and play your files on anything. You might just have to take an extra step of importing your music into a different piece of software.

          If anyone were to take that to court and claim that this requirement constituted a monopoly, the judge would try to say, between fits of laughter, "Buy your music from a different store and use that store's music management software. Now GTF out of my courtroom!"

  • Silly Apple, silly Palm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by avm (660) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:41PM (#28212131) Journal

    Silly Apple, if it only identifies its devices via a USB identifier, but interacts with them in standard, easily emulated ways, all the while going for the exclusivity angle.

    Silly Palm, for thinking Apple will take this lying down. But kudos for the balls to do it anyway.

    • Why is either silly (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperKendall (25149) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:47PM (#28212223)

      Silly Apple, if it only identifies its devices via a USB identifier, but interacts with them in standard, easily emulated ways, all the while going for the exclusivity angle.

      If it's only identifying devices in a standard, easily enumerated way - then they obviously are not going for the exclusivity angle. That part is your assertion but actual technical details seem to prove your assertion wrong.

      Silly Palm, for thinking Apple will take this lying down.

      I honestly don't think Apple will care much. It leads to more people buying things from iTunes after all and cements the dominance of iTunes for managing media. Perhaps they even did this in conjuction with Palm... if you think about it they would have been smart to do so.

      But kudos for the balls to do it anyway.

      Can't argue with that. Palm is an amazing company to come back the way they have, makes me think of the Palm of old...

  • Apple cannot block and it's not illegal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall (25149) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:43PM (#28212155)

    Two points:

    1) This is impossible for Apple to block. If according to USB it's an iPod, how can Apple distinguish? They can try to see if any little details are missing, but in the end any probing they do can easily be met by Palm.

    Nor is it even unsafe, because the code to support older iPods is pretty stable and will not change over time - the older iPods will always be supported.

    2) I'm pretty sure Apple sill not sue. What legality is there around USB identifiers? Nothing. The only hook there is the Apple string in the ID, but I don't think it's enough to put a case around. Why bother with the expense of a suit.

    It's a clever idea from Palm and I applaud them for it.

    • Well, if you read the article you would see that "the root USB node (IOUSBDevice) still identifies the device as a Palm Pre", therefore it appears that there are checks that could be put into the next version of iTunes to block this. If Apple were a bit smarter, they would make iTunes available for 50 quid for non-iPod devices.

    • Re:Apple cannot block and it's not illegal (Score:5, Informative)

      by DdJ (10790) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:19PM (#28212655) Homepage Journal

      Nor is it even unsafe, because the code to support older iPods is pretty stable and will not change over time - the older iPods will always be supported.

      But iPods can get firmware updates.

      The older iPods will always be supported. But do you know what happens if you plug in a first generation iPod right now and don't permit iTunes to update its firmware?

      All Apple has to do is put out firmware updates for all the legacy iPods (which they really have done in the past) and require those upgrades for iTunes to continue working. Apple can block this if they want to.

      Which is kinda stupid on Palm's part, IMO.

      You can use iTunes with other MP3 players -- I have several that still work with it. If iTunes sees a driver for your music player, it'll work with it. Palm could have done whatever they wanted and distributed a driver for their device, or they could have emulated a non-Apple device for which iTunes already had a driver (eg. Diamond Rio), which Apple doesn't have the freedom to require firmware updates for. I can understand why they didn't do the former -- they want users to be able to just plug in the devices and have them work, rather than installing device drivers. But I think it was unnecessarily risky to spoof an Apple device.

    • Re:Apple cannot block and it's not illegal (Score:5, Informative)

      by DdJ (10790) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:27PM (#28212799) Homepage Journal

      1) This is impossible for Apple to block. If according to USB it's an iPod, how can Apple distinguish?

      You didn't read all the links in the article.

      It's not the case that it's an iPod according to USB. That's not what Palm did.

      It's a USB device with an array of sub-devices. The mass storage portion claims to be an iPod mass storage device... but if you look at the whole tree, you can see that it's connected via a Palm device.

      The Pre does not pretend to be an iPod instead of a Pre. It pretends to be a Pre with an iPod inside it. Even easier for Apple to block than I had thought, if they care at all.

      • Aha, one mode (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall (25149) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:50PM (#28212257)

        But Palm wont be able to certify their device as USB unless the hack is an aftermarket hack.

        Why not? When you hit "Mount as Storage", the device acts as a bog standard USB mass storage device.

        When you hit media sync, it acts totally differently. But why should a special mode of using USB stop certification when it does offer a standard mode...

        Offering different options when plugging into USB is sheer genius.

          • But since this isn't a USB device, or being marked as one, they neither need a logo or a license. This is just a hack to make it seem like one and there is nothing illegal in that.

      • Next time you connect your Pre to iTunes, well, iTunes attempts to install iPod software on a Pre and I have no idea how happy the Pre will be with that :-(

        Well, the Pre will just respond with 'sure, upload the new firmware!' and pipe it over to the Pre equivalent of /dev/null. Then it will respond with the 'upgrade worked! Thanks alot!' code.

        Or, worst comes to worst, a simple update to the Pre allows it to emulate the new and improved firmware version.

  • Passwords aren't copyrighted (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ironchew (1069966) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:46PM (#28212205)

    *If* this is the only way to get data from iTunes, then spoofing the model and vendor should be like the Game Boy requesting an image of the Nintendo logo at bootup. There was a court ruling back in the 90s (Sega vs Galoob, I think) that said the image was treated as a password to go through the BIOS bootup, therefore, anybody could put it in their games. This is probably a completely different ball game, though.

  • I see no code here. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argent (18001) <peter.slashdot@2006@taronga@com> on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:08PM (#28212511) Homepage Journal

    Dumping the USB registers: cool.

    Commentator confusing USB registers with code: not cool.

    Mod DVD Jon +1
    Mod Slashdot -1

    • Re:DMCA ??? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Gay for Linux (942545) on Thursday June 04 2009, @12:51PM (#28212289)
      Their trick, in other words...

      Pre: "Knock knock"
      Windows: "Whoâ(TM)s there?"
      Pre: "iPod."
      Windows: "Cool, come in. Hey iTunes, Iâ(TM)ve got an iPod for you."
      iTunes: "You donâ(TM)t look like an iPod but if Windows says you are, thatâ(TM)s good enough for me. Smoke some of this music."
      Pre: "Kickass."

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Ugh, the text encoding in Windows is terrible.

      • I would like to know just one thing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by mrwolf007 (1116997) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:46PM (#28213079)
        How is this any different than Opera/Firefox/whatever changing the User-Agent string?
        Neither looks like anything complicated nor like anything illegal.

      • Re:DMCA ??? (Score:5, Funny)

        by sootman (158191) on Thursday June 04 2009, @03:24PM (#28214481) Journal

        Reader: Knock, knock
        Slashdot: Who's there?
        Reader: Unicode.
        Slashdot: Fuck off.

        Back on topic, John Gruber has covered this pretty well here [daringfireball.net] and here. [daringfireball.net]

        "But is it illegal? And would it be illegal for Apple to take countermeasures against it? My guess is "no" to both questions... I don't think WebOS's media sync is a mistake on Palm's part because it is wrong, I think it's a mistake because it is risky and unnecessary."

    • MTP (Score:5, Informative)

      by assassinator42 (844848) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:14PM (#28212575)
      Well, there is a standard for media syncing [wikipedia.org], but it's developed by Microsoft and apparently not followed. Especially by Microsoft with their Zune, as they decided to ignore the standards they had created and sold to third-party developers in favor of something that only works with their software.
      Mass storage mode still seems to work better. Again, Microsoft will allow watching a video on the Xbox 360 from a mass storage device but not a MTP device.

    • Re:Poor Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ohcrapitssteve (1185821) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:28PM (#28212807) Homepage
      I've never seen the rules one should follow when releasing a device that might end up in millions of hands, but I'm sure they include the following:

      1) Don't use an unstable hack to enable a feature that a very large percentage of potential users will be counting on.
      2) Don't base a feature on a cat-and-mouse game. Especially with the likes of Apple, who are really good at that particular game.
      3) Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup. Jobs was bragging about patents in the iPhone announcement keynote, for Christ sake.

      • Re:Poor Open Source (Score:5, Informative)

        by changa (197280) on Thursday June 04 2009, @02:38PM (#28213883) Homepage

        I think Palm is counting on them yelling than then Palm will lean on them with their patents.

        Remember Palm defined this space long before Apple did and from a few quotes from palm recently they are going to use that as leverage.

        Quote from Palm CEO:

        "The whole area of patents is elaborate; a lot of issues there, and a very complex area. One of the things we've done over 15 years is build a very extensive patent portfolio in the mobile computing space, one of the highest-rated patent portfolios in this space, which contains more than 1,500 patents. And the reason you do that is to have a defensive position in the marketplace. It's kind of like two little porcupines going around, and you don't want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything's OK and we keep working together."

    • Re:Good or Bad? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ledow (319597) on Thursday June 04 2009, @01:28PM (#28212803) Homepage

      You really think that there isn't a SINGLE Apple employee who couldn't get hold of a Pre if they wanted to, or that they don't already have one? Even in their hardware, PR, developer etc. departments? And that "revelation" was basically revealed by plugging the device in and looking at the usbid... lsusb would have done it in a single command and there are even prettier interfaces for Windows for free.

      Obscurity is a waste of time when you're hoping the *designers* of a system don't realise how you've worked around it - it's like "telling" the DVD forum about the CSS hack - they already know *how* you circumvent it, but they may not know the exact method by which you discovered it (that's the bit that *doesn't* matter). The designers of any such system already know, or it would take seconds to make 10 guesses at how, and it would take minutes to actually discover how even without basic knowledge - you just run it through a debug version of iTunes and see what happens.

      Don't be silly. It's like saying Microsoft don't know how people are installing pirate copies of Windows, or upping the TCP connection limit, or Nintendo not knowing how the Wii hacks work. It takes *seconds* for them to work it out once it's been revealed, even if they would never have thought of it. They DESIGNED the system, after all.

    • Re:Quoth DVD Jon... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by R3d M3rcury (871886) on Thursday June 04 2009, @04:38PM (#28215375) Journal

      P.S. If Palm had just gone to Apple and said "we want to make the Palm Pre sync with iTunes", would Apple have been reasonable about it? I saw a comment on Slashdot mentioning that there are non-Apple devices that sync with iTunes, implying that Apple can be reasonable.

      That ability is left-over from the SoundJam days, which is why the list is so antiquated. I'm also pretty sure that whatever sync code there is for 3rd party devices was written by Apple, not the device manufacturer.

      Personally, I think this is one of those, "Easier to ask forgiveness than permission" things. Assuming that Apple will sue Palm, this is just another thing that Apple can add to the list and will be worked out in whatever settlement Apple and Palm come to.

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