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posted by martyb on Friday August 21 2020, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the did-they-interview-Sergeant-Schultz? dept.

The submissions, from Gizmodo and Ars Technica, are both sourced from: The Case of the Top Secret iPod. Like a good mystery story, it reads like a spy mystery thriller. It starts off with:

It was a gray day in late 2005. I was sitting at my desk, writing code for the next year's iPod. Without knocking, the director of iPod Software—my boss's boss—abruptly entered and closed the door behind him. He cut to the chase. "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."

The next day, the receptionist called to tell me that two men were waiting in the lobby. I went downstairs to meet Paul and Matthew, the engineers who would actually build this custom iPod. I'd love to say they wore dark glasses and trench coats and were glancing in window reflections to make sure they hadn't been tailed, but they were perfectly normal thirty-something engineers. I signed them in, and we went to a conference room to talk.

[...] They didn't actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod's disk in a way that couldn't be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.

They'd do all the work. My job was to provide any help they needed from Apple.

There's speculation about what the modified device actually did, but no "smoking gun". Geiger counter? Voice recorder? Something else? What could it be?

Without violating any non-disclosure agreements, are there any Soylentils who'd worked on any clandestine projects who'd like to weigh in?


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:32PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:32PM (#1039842)

    The big secrets eventually come out.

    My father told stories of developing the B-29 bomber at Boeing during WWII. The flight test program had many serious problems--engine fires in flight and many others, including a crash that killed the chief test pilot, his crew and people on the ground in Seattle. The most likely root cause was braking an unwritten rule. Either: develop a new engine on a well sorted airframe, or, use a well developed and reliable engine when developing a new aircraft.

    At that time the B-29 was the most expensive weapon system ever and extremely top secret or whatever the equivalent was at the time. Management and the Army were pushing very hard on the engineers to keep flying but never told the reason that the project had such high priority. Only later did they realize that there was no other bomber with the range and payload to carry an atom bomb to Japan.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:33PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:33PM (#1039844)

    s/braking/breaking

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 21 2020, @04:18PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 21 2020, @04:18PM (#1039958) Journal

      Braking an unwritten rule would ware it down to wear it could no longer could be red.

      --
      When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.