Hack my iPod Please!
There's a great tiny article over at the New York Daily News: Starbucks may fill coffee cups, iPods. It's essentially saying that industry titans Apple and Starbucks are teaming to deliver music downloads to iPod owners while they wait for their Strawberry Caramel Chai Mochachino. From the article:"A lot of our customers are asking for device fill-up, and going forward we'll do that," said Ken Lombard, president of Starbucks Entertainment, at the Midem music industry conference in Cannes.
Instead of having to buy a CD version of "Vince Vaughn sings Tony Bennett's Greatest Hits" at the super-hip coffee emporium, taking it home, ripping it, then syncing to your iPod, I'm guessing the use model they're going after is more come into a Starbucks, select a song or album on a kiosk, dock yer iPod and Viola! You've got music.
But there are a couple issues here that I hope someone at either company is tracking.
First off... when you sync your iPod with a machine, you're syncing your iPod with every iPod that machine has synced with in the past. Viruses are, in general, not a problem for iPods. That's because they're somewhat difficult to get to and once you got there, what would be the point. To put a virus on an iPod, you would have to find a vulnerability in the iPod em the system it attaches to, effectively doubling the effort required. And once you've got a virus on an iPod, what are you going to do? Display nekkid pictures of Steve Jobs? Refuse to play anything except Sex Pistols and Pat Boone?
In the past couple of years we've seen an increase in the activity of serious criminal system-crackers. These guys are attacking home user's PCs and if successful, using them to carry out acts of extortion. I don't know if that's something we'll see coming to a portable music player near you. But the draw of being the "hacker that hacked your iPod through Starbuck's systems" is sure to attract some of the less socially developed hackers in our community.
I don't want to be an alarmist; the sky isn't falling.
But... it would be nice to hear that Apple or Starbucks spends a few moments thinking about risks and mitigations of this distribution channel.
Tags: ipod, security, Apple, Starbucks
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