Jag läste just om en smått fantastiskt "reverse engineering"-historia. En kille behövde få ut iPodens firmware för att kunna se hur Apple använde I/O i iPoden. Han löste det genom att få iPoden att låta, att gny och pipa, och spelade in detta och tolkade det tillbaka till kod igen. Låter inte klokt, men fungerade:
A reverse engineer (Nils Schneider) wanted to study the firmware of the Apple iPod in order to figure out how to write software that runs on iPods. But he experienced a chicken-and-egg problem: after learning how to write simple programs to run on an iPod, he found that he couldn't figure out how to use the iPod's I/O hardware (in order to extract a copy of the firmwire) without studying the firmwire first to see how Apple does I/O. At the same time, he couldn't study the firmware without first extracting a copy of it.
His ingenious solution was to use someone else's technique for making the iPod squawk and squeak, in order to write a program that output the firmware as a series of sounds (which could then be recorded using a microphone, and analyzed using software on a PC in order to convert them back into a digital representation of the firmware). In effect, he turned the iPod and microphone system into an acoustic modem, and wrote his own modulation scheme for representing data as sound. He wasn't using the iPod's headphone jack; he was making the iPod itself squeak and squawk, using a piezoelectric element somewhere inside the iPod. To protect against background noise, he had to put the iPod and the microphone together inside a padded box, and let them sit for eight hours.
Läs mer här: Protecting creativity [via [url="http://www.boingboing.net/2005/02/26/ipod_aco..."]Boing Boing[/url]]
