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?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snospar on Friday August 21 2020, @10:00AM (1 child)
The first rule of clandestine projects is we don't talk about clandestine projects.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @03:57PM
The second rule is that the real details are NEVER as interesting as the speculation.
(Score: 4, Funny) by stretch611 on Friday August 21 2020, @12:21PM (1 child)
http://www.theboxisthereforareason.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Screen-Shot-2017-05-27-at-22.13.05.png [theboxisthereforareason.com]
Simple... They made Donald Trump an Etch-A-Sketch that can tweet.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday August 21 2020, @03:31PM
Almost a decade, before he became president, right . . .
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:32PM (2 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @12:33PM (1 child)
s/braking/breaking
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday August 21 2020, @04:18PM
Braking an unwritten rule would ware it down to wear it could no longer could be red.
If we work together, we can cut all homeless people and poor people in half by the end of 2025!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @01:17PM
Not a feature available on iPods IIRC and unlikely to arouse suspicion when carried into a meeting.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday August 21 2020, @01:39PM (1 child)
Raw signals serial port is a key to mostly everything. Everything. Mostly.
A child's Geiger detector, fits any FTDI bridge: https://www.adafruit.com/product/483 [adafruit.com]
Some smart people actually use this toy as a helper for generating random numbers.
But official IPod hacking by agencies/contractors requiring manufacturer's engineer support is quite a lame approach, for there were many other MP3 music players on the market in that epoch which actually ran Linux kernel on them already, out of box. And some of them even had public FOSS reimplementation of firmware. Remember those japanese hardrives at the format of a CF card? No engineering help from manufacturers needed. Two alien people (manager and engineer) is too much for one secret to keep. That's why we read about it.
I even noticed a hidden serial port on NVIDA Turing card I purchased three days ago, probably a telemetry for hpc. With some twiddling to firmware, I am sure it is possible to hook something on that too.
My favorites insertions in computer frontend panels were the ID12/ID20 RFID reader chips, rendering them impossible to power on or log in by uninitiates.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Friday August 21 2020, @01:50PM
I agree that serial ports are a very powerful input to systems. Often you can interrupt the bootloader and, as an example jump to points in memory and execute. Damn most bootloaders are chain bootloaders where jumping around to special memory addresses initializes hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 21 2020, @02:53PM
Apple 338S1116
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday August 21 2020, @04:24PM (1 child)
Maybe the modified device was:
* to be plugged into a computer to compromise it or exfiltrate data
* to make secret audio recordings
* to keep a list of all GPS locations where the device was taken (ah! you DID visit such and so facility!)
* to be used with special usb to cereal cable to connect to something and do something something
* record certain radio frequencies (or transmit?)
* monitor whether its user was listening to unlicensed music
If we work together, we can cut all homeless people and poor people in half by the end of 2025!
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday August 21 2020, @10:48PM
"Ms. Daniels, we're ready for you to test the prototype."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2020, @12:30AM
So... it's a nothing burger. In other words, It's a millenial post, eh.