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Palm Pre "iTunes Hack" Detailed By DVD Jon
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."
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.
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."
Reader: Knock, knock
Slashdot: Who's there?
Reader: Unicode.
Slashdot: Fuck off.
Back on topic, John Gruber has covered this pretty well here and here.
"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."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What's the charge? "Impersonating an Apple Device"? What law is that exactly...
If there were a law, these people would have been arrested.
On second thought, maybe we do need such a law... :^)