And this discovery in the ROM had me (and a few others here in the office this morning) in stitches.

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That's the same one that Tom posted.

Damn! Missed that post of his. Sorry!

The Pre is DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Palm really should have found a way to put a D-pad on there...

Well, with the discovery of a crude but acceptable tethering solution, I ran out of excuses to avoid taking the Pre plunge. Every store in the area was out, so I'm 7th on the list at the local Sprint store.

The hacking community for the Pre is really coming into its own, and so far, Palm's been pretty laissez-faire about it. So far folks are tweaking the built-in apps, messing around with the device's internals, and all of the other fun things we used to do on the empeg so many years ago. I think it'll be a fun device to play with, and hopefully it works okay as a phone, too.

<hybrid8>You idiot, what are you thinking!?!?!!?</hybrid8>

Consumers buying a Pre aren't idiots. Ed Colligan and Roger Macnamee were douche bags for spouting BS and the Pre is just another phone among many.

What I would not feel comfortable with doing however, is running a hacked tethering option on Sprint which they're likely going to shut down before it even gets mildly popular.

Palm themselves have already threatened that they may have to take legal action to force the shutdown of the wiki where the hacking and tethering were first discussed if the tethering talk isn't eliminated.

BTW, the iPhone 3GS, which is officially out in three days, has seemingly already sold many more units than the Pre in the US. It's a good thing that the Pre isn't competing with the iPhone but instead the Blackberry. I do find it incredible though, considering AT&T is so utterly crap by all accounts.

It looks like it might be quite the cat and mouse game till someone figures out how to disable the forced upgrades on the phone.

The tethering support for now is much like it was in the early days of the iPhone, via SOCKS proxy. I wonder how long it will be till the PDANet people get something working. They might have a head start if the classic side can somehow get access to the USB port.

Both of my two-year Sprint contracts had language saying tethering was verboten. Four years later, I'm still a happy Sprint customer, and tethering still works just fine. Judging by the Treocentral and Pre Central forums, there are millions of users like me who've never had a problem, and only a handful of folks who've been banned for abuse/overuse. Why would they start cracking down now?

Yeah, they're free to do whatever they want, whether it's applying pressure on the wiki admins or updating the firmware in the future to block tethering. But I don't see why they'd be concerned about light volume tethering using a not-at-all-user-friendly hack that only a small subset of users will bother to deal with. If they block it and there are no workarounds, I'll complain, but I'll live.

My hunch is that Sprint doesn't want tethering to be user-friendly, as I'm sure they want to sell their mobile broadband cards/plans. But with Apple's giant head start in terms of application availability, I think they'll want to take a hands-off approach to most hacking efforts.

In the end, even if Sprint decides to get Gung Ho about blocking tethering, I think the hackers will win as they usually do, and I'll have some mechanism for tethered EVDO access when I really need it.

The sad thing is that tethering on my old Motorola KRZR is a trivial Bluetooth setting, and I used it all the time, whereas tethering on these smartphones is a serious issue, yet I hardly ever feel the need to tether any more.

I'll be curious to see how things go with the forced upgrade issue. Sure, the hackers will probably find ways to get ghetto tethering going again. The real question is, how many people are willing to jump through the hoops every time to get it working? I got lucky on the iPhone twice now regarding tethering, but it's not something I depend on or expect to still work tomorrow. First, I was able to snag NetShare off the app store, providing the same ghetto tethering via SOCKS, and allowing basic connectivity. The biggest issue that method has is that there is no way to VPN with it, and it's tricky on OS X to get SOCKS wrappers working to allow other non proxy able apps to work. Then somehow during the 3.0 beta cycle, the official tethering via USB or Bluetooth started working. This is still going for me, even with the 3.0 GM build cleanly restored onto the phone, so for now I've got full tethering. If it goes away tomorrow, oh well.

I just wish the carriers would allow tethering on a daily basis, instead of charging so much more for it on a monthly basis. The rare times I need tethering are usually when I am stuck with paying for crappy hotel internet.

Like you, I rarely feel the need to tether, but when I need it, I need it. Sometimes I'm in a hotel and their free LAN/wifi access is garbage, or I'm in an airport that wants to hit me for $9 to use the wifi for an hour before my flight. In many of these situations, using my phone will be good enough, but sometimes if I need to type a long-ish email, tethering is very useful. But not $30/month useful! And that's, I think, why Sprint has been hands-off with light tethering -- they know they're not going to get the light user to pay for a mobile broadband plan anyway.

I'd gladly pay $5 for an officially-supported tethering plan with a pretty low bandwidth cap, but such a plan doesn't exist, so I'm gonna go the unofficial route like I always have. If they want to keep me as a customer (the early termination fee is less than the cost difference between Sprint and AT&T service, and Verizon is getting the Pre in six months) they'll let me do it.

Pretty much the only times in the past year, since I got my iPhone, that I've wanted to tether was when I had a laptop full of work, fresh off the plane, that I wanted to sync with the outside world. More than once, I've found my way to the Continental President's Club, where the members-only WiFi leaks conveniently out through the walls.

Apple sez "hey, Pre, stop bitin' mah s**t."

Link about how the USB PID/VID changes when in media sync mode. For lazy people that don't want to go through the links.

I guess Palm didn't want the expense to make their own music syncing software that worked along side iTunes. You can still copy tracks directly to the Pre in mass storage mode though, right?

I'd expect Apple to refine its device detection to make sure that the correct iPods are being recognized. Note that this is different than "blocking the Pre" - that's what I'd do in their shoes anyway. Of course Palm can just back out the hack they have in there now, especially since it can be argued to be a DMCA violation.

Not sure what you mean by "along side iTunes", but it comes with Amazon's MP3 downloader thingie, which someone recently figured out how to hack to download songs over the EVDO connection. Probably won't make Sprint happy if they notice that.

Yeah, you can just copy songs over.

It's definitely in the DMCA violation neighborhood, so I expected this type of response. Frankly, I don't care one bit about iTunes sync, so it's no big deal to me if Apple successfully nukes it for the Pre.

What I mean, is that iTunes is an enormous development expense. It's also long established as the market leading music management application. Palm could not afford the expense of time nor money to make their own music management application. That much is obvious.

But instead of making their own bridging application that could look at one's iTunes music collection and then shuttle the appropriate files to the Pre, they went ahead and just implemented the current hack.

They could have also gone a different route and licensed SongBird. But they thought it would be easier and more convenient to leverage Apple's investment and property.

On that topic, I'm totally with you. Complete dickmove on Palm's part, and I hope that when the dust settles they officially support something legit.

FWIW, people have both Songbird and Amarok working just fine with the Pre now, but it'd be nice to see Palm officially support them in the future.

I'm a bit bothered by the fact that Palm is now trying to paint Apple in a negative light regarding their iTunes support docs and with regards to the prospect of the Pre not being supported in iTunes in the future.

I'd love to see them publicly disclose exactly how they "engineered" the Pre's iTunes compatibility in the first place. Your geek types know, but the general public won't, so it would be easy for Palm to continue to point the finger at Apple.

Is there some type of onus now, that when your application, designed to interface only with your own hardware, becomes popular enough, that you have to start putting in support for other vendors' hardware?

Really, if Palm don't want to sell a phone where people have to manually copy tracks over a USB mass storage connection, then they should develop their own application or LICENSE someone else's. If they want to pay to license iTunes connectivity, then let them approach Apple with that. BUt in the end it's Apple's call and they shouldn't be made to look like dicks because they're protecting their own work and revenue streams.

I'm afraid I need to disagree with you. Palm engineering the Pre to "lie" about being an iPod is really no different than the way browsers "lie" about themselves by claiming to be one another in the user-agent string. E.g., IE 6 calls itself "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1)".

If Palm was somehow arranging to play Apple's DRM'ed content, then that would represent a significantly different position, but Palm is quite clear they don't support this. Instead, by building the Palm to be a drop-in replacement for an iPod, then they work great with iTunes and presumably with other non-Apple music managers.

My non-lawyer opinion of interesting legal questions:

- Did Palm illegally reverse-engineer Apple technologies? This is probably more of a click-wrap issue than a DMCA issue, since they don't support Apple DRM content.

- Did Palm violate any Apple patents? We know Apple's already rattled around on this issue.

My guess is that the two companies end up signing a patent cross-licensing deal that explicitly allows Palm to be iTunes-compatible as they are now. Unclear which way the money would actually flow, but given that Palm has its own stack of patents, both companies would be crazy to try to litigate.

I wonder what it would cost them to purchase the rights to Rio Music Manager? Or would that even be useful to them?

tanstaafl.

I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't need any Palm patents for anything, considering their Newton device had a ton or IP and predates the Palm products. I can't see too much coming over from the older Palm IP that would be useful for the iPhone and iPods. On the other hand, I think Palm is definitely going to step on some Apple patents at some point. Anyway, all that's moot, since I wasn't inferring any patent issues. My personal belief is also that all software patents should be eliminated and that no patents ever be issued on software again, but that's a topic for another time.

Palm are reporting their device as being an Apple product. That includes using the trademarks "Apple" and 'iPod" in their product strings. They are also violating USB rules by misrepresenting their product's descriptors. Pretty sure you won't find a USB logo on the Palm product since you're not allowed to use one if you break the USB agreements.

This tactic is completely different than browsers lying. Browsers aren't leveraging the IP of another company when they misrepresent their IDs. BTW, I'm not aware that any current browser does this anymore anyway. It's frowned upon in the browser domain, but in this case it's a matter of a hardware vendor trying to promote their product by leveraging the millions of dollars spent by Apple on iTunes. They're leveraging both Apple's development efforts as well as marketing efforts. So Palm are trying to get for free what other vendors must pay licensing fees for (iPod accessories).

This is their line of thinking "Why bother developing our own software when we can just use Apple's?" - Why didn't they do the same thing to be able to use the Zune software? Why did they do anything at all considering mass storage mode allows manual copying?

They're trying to ride Apple's coat tales here and IMO, they need to pay some financial reparations to make this right. I'm sure Apple won't accept any money from them and will simply maintain that iTunes supports only iPods. It's easy enough to make the Pre stop working with iTunes, it's just a matter of how this will play out in the media in my opinion. Will Apple look evil? And are they willing to take that chance?

Well, no, but isn't it true that under law there is an onus on you when you're the market leader, that you're not allowed to deliberately disable other vendors' products when they've made them compatible with yours?

Although I've only a limited amount of sympathy for Palm here, seeing as their interoperability technique only enables Itunes interoperability with Palm hardware -- they're guilty of exactly the same thing for which they want to portray Apple as evil. The Right Answer here would be some sort of driver that presents any mass-storage player as having the Ipod VID and PID in order to enable Itunes synchronisation.

Peter

That is the looked up VID/PID.


More people have iTunes. The iTunes/iPod database format is well known despite the attempts by Apple to lock people out.

I hate to say this, but try thinking of this problem like a lawyer and not a technologist. Palm can only get in trouble if:

- they misrepresent their product (e.g., saying it's iTunes compatible when it's not)

- they violated a click-wrap agreement that had contractual language that they violated (and that would make for a fun legal battle)

- they violated the DMCA (which would, likewise, make for a fun legal battle)

- they violated Apple copyrights in some fashion (e.g., they borrowed code from iTunes or from an iPod)

- they violated Apple patents

- they're misusing Apple's trademarks

- they stole trade secrets from Apple

I'm probably forgetting some things, but none of these legal issues are anywhere in the ballpark of "Palm is riding on Apple's coattails". That's not intrinsically illegal. The false USB identifier thing may be an issue with the USB Implementor's Forum (or it's Compliance Committee), but they're not Apple.

So long as Palm isn't using any of Apple's trademarks, and so long as they're didn't use some kind of insider information from Apple, then there's nothing legally wrong with what they've done. If anything, they're doing their customers a favor by being plug-compatible with a popular tool for managing tunes.

Again, I fail to see any reason that Palm owes Apple anything. If anything, Apple should try to encourage other media players to offer similar levels of compatibility with iTunes, rather than potentially getting itself into an anti-competitive position by tying iTunes together with iPods.

(Arguably, they should also let iTunes purchase tunes as easily from other stores as from the iTunes Store, but I don't see that happening any time soon, unless somebody like the EU antitrust busters comes after them.)

iTunes works with Rio devices and several others. The article is no longer updated, but iTunes 8.2 still has the code in there for these devices.


I haven't really seen anything to prove Apple is specifically trying to lock people out. The format has changed over time, but this is no different then major versions of other software changing it's structure of data files. Their stance on 3rd party iTunes tools seems to be very similar to the Apple TV hacking. Feel free to do it, but Apple makes no guarantee or effort to ensure backwards compatibility.

Palm is riding coat tails by relying on Apple's technology and investment in iTunes and iPod to provide a music platform for their Pre product instead of investing in developing their own technology for that purpose.

I wasn't making an argument for illegality, but what they've done is scummy as hell and a downright embarrassment for such a large commercial entity.

iTunes does work with a few other devices. Those devices, such as the Nomad, were licensed for operation with iTunes before Apple came out with the iPod and while Apple was still actively licensing this ability.

Pretending to be an iPod is NOT how you make something compatible. The Pre is not compatible with iTunes in the least. iPods are compatible with iTunes and the Pre is simply pretending to be a specific iPod.

Apple's music, purchased through iTunes, now that it lacks DRM, is fully compatible with many players, as long as they can play AAC. It would make no financial sense for Apple to allow iTunes to access any other music store. I don't think any case can be made legally to try and change this, nor do I think there should be (in case anyone is thinking of some new law because of the current situation). Likewise, I don't believe existing laws would be able to open the iTunes music store up to other applications or other parties. That would be like trying to force Amazon to allow their web site to function for purchases from Barnes and Noble (without giving Amazon a cut).

Apple got to where it is today in the music industry and player market through innovation, hard work, timing (which wasn't an accident) and persistence. If Palm or anyone else wants their products to work with iTunes then approach Apple and work through official channels.

If an unofficial method needed to be implemented, then they should have at least written some program for each platform they support their phone on to communicate with iTunes (or additional music managers), to find out where the music is and then shuttle it themselves to their device. This can be accomplished quite easily on Mac OS with nothing more than AppleScript and in Windows I believe you can accomplish it with Javascript. Or, they could have even just read Apple's plain text XML which details the music location.

Those approaches would have been fine. Pretending to be someone else's device is a cop out and it should be disabled by Palm before it gets remedied by Apple.

They added a hash to the iPod database specifically to block people from using something other than iTunes.

They added a hash to the DAAP protocol to stop you streaming from iTunes if you're not Apple or Roku.

Neither of those apply to the iTunes database format. The point Bruno was making earlier is that Palm could have written their own app that reads the iTunes database to find where the music files are, and sync them to the device.

I did miss your earlier comment about the iPod database, and I do remember that specific "lockout". To me, it still seems like it was a change to help with DB integrity between the iPod and iTunes, as it contained the iPod device ID and a signature from the iTunes DB along with some other numbers. Had Apple been sitting there making the change only to lock out 3rd party sync tools, they could have easily changed it every version of iTunes. They haven't changed it beyond that one time though.

The DAAP thing is annoying to me, as it simply pushed it deeper into being a proprietary protocol. DLNA seems to have become the standard for streaming media across a local network, and it's a standard Apple has continued to ignore.