Surely if they can make an approved master CD, they can also make a master CD-ROM of MP3 tracks, which they can shove into the laptop, verify a checksum on, download to the empeg, then after the verification, see the loaded checksum on the target machine?

The fact that the empeg displays the correct checksum doesn't mean anything. If you can change the player software (or the kernel) then you can have it display the checksum of the judge's file and still play your modified copy.

For any checksum based scheme to work, the following needs to happen:

1. Empeg must disallow all changes to the player software. No custom kernels or developer images;
2. IASCA must audit all of the player hardware and software to make sure there are no backdoors and the checksum is calculated correctly.

I hope 1. never happens and 2. sounds highly unlikely.

Borislav