James Bond's secret playlist

August 18, 2020 12:12 PM

“I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.”
posted by They sucked his brains out! (14 comments total)

Very cool tale. Good read! Thanks!
I especially like the part where, if you were inside any of Apple’s buildings and on their wi-fi, you still needed a VPN to get past their firewall and onto the Apple network proper.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:30 PM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Isn't that standard practice? Otherwise if you want to get past the firewall you just stand out on the street or in reception or something with a laptop, or hide a cellular router inside the building and connect back to it later.
posted by doop at 12:48 PM on August 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

I liked the reminder that the older ipods were somewhat hackable. I had a 3rd gen (?) ipod that I loved but that was in a weird spot as far as the custom firmwares were concerned in that you could load them on the device but it then wouldn't be able to decode mp3s in real-time. The ones with video were powerful enough to do it but not mine. 30GB of portable storage for music was an amazing amount that I haven't had since (my current phone has more storage, 64GB, but most of that is taken up with apps, photos, and videos). Eventually after many years the hard drive died and while I probably could have installed a new one to keep the thing alive it wasn't a project I felt like undertaking.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:11 PM on August 18, 2020

Isn't that standard practice?

The companies I worked at (that had wifi) had their wifi completely behind the firewall. There was no public side. You were either credentialed and in or not.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:28 PM on August 18, 2020

Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, there was a special pride in the engineering departments I was in at Apple, in not doing defense work. Then one day, an engineer got to talking about this big issue some customers had with our computers. These were Apple II’s. It seems that these customers worked on highly secret sort of things and they had a policy that if a computer broke down, they would lock it up for two weeks, unplugged, to make sure the RAM was truly empty. Then they would send it in for repair. Who are these people we asked? Defense. Turns out there were defense contracts, but who and how many, no clue. But at least at that time, there was only one Apple badge and you could pretty much go anywhere.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:32 PM on August 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

the iPod team developed on Windows computers. Apple didn’t have working ARM developer tools yet, because this was before the iPhone shipped. The iPod team used ARM developer tools from ARM Ltd, which ran only on Windows and Linux.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:24 PM on August 18, 2020

I especially like the part where, if you were inside any of Apple’s buildings and on their wi-fi, you still needed a VPN to get past their firewall and onto the Apple network proper.

It's probably not a VPN but it's 802.11x authentication which requires devices to present what's essentially a signed certificate to get onto the network. Or maybe a RADIUS server which is pretty much the same thing I think.

This is standard practice in pretty much every big corporate network. If I brought a personal computer into my office (if it was open) plugging it into an ethernet drop would get me zero access to the network.
posted by GuyZero at 2:25 PM on August 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

Back in the 80’s and early 90’s, there was a special pride in the engineering departments I was in at Apple, in not doing defense work.

In the 80's the Valley ran on Defense department money. Shit, I think Lockheed is still making missiles in Sunnyvale over near the Home Depot. (edit: my bad, it's Northrop Grumman Marine Systems over by Home Depot)
posted by GuyZero at 2:31 PM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Apple was big on RADIUS WiFi in the early 00s.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:04 PM on August 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

My employer does WiFi the Apple way, though there is a corporate-only WiFi network as well. Since we mostly use laptops, it wasn’t unknown to have a developer undock their machine to get access to the open WiFi network to download a library or utility from a website that wasn’t reachable through the firewall.
posted by lhauser at 7:07 PM on August 18, 2020

Ummmmmm, there's a story about secret DOE hardware secretly installed in ipods and what this thread turns into is a discussion of corporate WiFi policy?
posted by medusa at 7:22 PM on August 18, 2020 [9 favorites]

So happy to see this getting an FPP! I've been best friends with the author of the article since pre-kindergarten (we're in our late 50's now), and I am very glad he's writing up some of his more interesting experiences. Rock on, David!
posted by mosk at 9:26 PM on August 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

What a lovely article. Given the flexibility and hackability of these early iPods this doesn’t surprise me at all.

I didn’t have any programming skills, but I was a big time enthusiast and user of the iPod Linux scene. I had a download of the entire text of English Wikipedia (no images) loaded on my iPod nano: 1.8gb. Part of the reason it was so small was because Wikipedia had much harsher standards for noteworthiness of articles. It took about 30 seconds or a minute for a searched term (or hyperlink!!) to pull up an article, but the little nano could do it and then you could scroll through and read. I also had a full-speed gameboy emulator, which I used for Mario Land and Pokémon Red. The scroll wheel was actually a circle of 8 touch-sensitive buttons; instead of using it like a wheel, these positions could be tapped to act as every button a gameboy needs (up/down/left/right, then a/b/select/start on the diagonal). My most fun tech memories hands down.

The iPod hacking scene evaporated almost overnight when the iPhone came out - recall that the iPhone 1 essentially WAS an iPod at the beginning, with no App Store and only simple functions like phone, camera, and music. But it was quickly jailbroken, leading to a ton of innovation for things like emulation and time wasters. Compared to the lucrative micro-transactions and huge app business, it was a very different world - there was no money in it, so it was all very amateurish and fun.
posted by Buckt at 10:49 PM on August 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Cool article!

also, ob-wifi-policy - I know several companies around that time that had wireless that dropped you outside the firewall and you had to VPN in. Much simpler to treat it all as external hosts rather than try to get various authentication and 802.1x schemes working, particularly given the state of the art at the time.
posted by rmd1023 at 12:19 PM on August 19, 2020