Left to chance

Update: so someone started a petition on the Apple forums proposing that Apple either build iTunes for Linux, or they ‘unlock’ the locked database they introduced. Want to see the thread? Well it was here, but apparently Apple saw fit to remove it. That, along with their firmware upgrades to the iPhone that would undo (or even brick) previously modified phones, it’s pretty obvious they don’t want to have ‘open’ products. Check Digg for more coverage/commentary.

After being excited about the new iPod’s released by Apple just weeks ago, now we’re hearing that they may contain code to lock people out of their own devices. BoingBoing picks up the story, “The latest iPods have a cryptographic “checksum” in their song databases that prevents third-party applications from synching with the portable music players. This means that iPods can no longer be used with operating systems where iTunes doesn’t exist — like Linux, where gtkpod and Amarok are common free tools used by iPod owners to load their players. Notice that this has nothing to do with piracy – this is about Apple limiting the choices available to people who buy their iPod hardware.” I know that as a Linux user I’m certainly in the minority of computer users, however Linux has been seen as a true alternative to Windows by some of Apple’s biggest competitors, Dell and HP. Additionally, it’s amazing that with the recent momentum towards opening up digital rights in their distribution of (some) DRM free songs from the iTunes store that Apple would choose to limit their customer’s choice by limiting how they can use your device. This is exactly what we’re concerned about when we say Digital Rights. How do you have rights if something you buy has limits on how you can use it? Now some are speculating that the lack of DRM is the reason Apple wants to lock their iPods down, “It’s hard to understand why Apple would do this, but the most likely explanations are that Apple wants to be sure that competitors can’t build their own players to load up iPods — now that half of the major labels have gone DRM free, it’s conceivable that we’d get a Rhapsody or Amazon player that automatically loaded the non-DRM tracks they sold you on your iPod (again, note that this has nothing to do with preventing piracy — this is about preventing competition with the iTunes Store).”

There are reports of what is going on, as far as a technical level, “At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file. If you try to do either of these, the hashes will not match and the iPod will report that it contains “0 songs” when the iTunesDB would otherwise be perfectly adequate.” Of course it’s pretty much assumed that some hackers will be able to get around this, but then any ‘updates’ released by Apple will fill these holes as they appear. So while this is hardly the first time a big company has tried to lock in customers, it comes somewhat unexpected from a company like Apple. I saw a sticker at Defcon that summed up all of the digital rights concern with the simple phrase, “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” and that’s true on many levels. Here’s hoping that Apple will think about how their new scheme limit’s their users’ digital rights, and has an ‘update’ that returns them to the freedom they deserve. Otherwise I, and I’m sure many more, users will migrate to another audio player.