So, Apple now blocks third-party software from accessing iPods. But is behaviour like that news? No, unfortunately not at all.
Let's have a look on two technologies that are closely related to the iPod and Apple-style media playback: DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) and RAOP (Remote Audio Output Protocol). RAOP is the protocol that is spoken when you want to output audio from iTunes over the network on your AirPort base station. DAAP is the popular protocol which you can use to swap music between multiple iTunes instances on a LAN. Both technologies use cryptographic hashes to block interoperable alternative implementations.
Now, the RAOP client crypto key has been extracted from iTunes, hence its now possible to implement alternative software that takes the role of iTunes and streams audio to an AirPort. However, noone managed to extract the RAOP server key yet, hence noone is able to implement software that exposes itself as AirPort-compatible audio sink on the network, so that iTunes could stream data to it.
With DAAP it's a similar situation: iTunes uses cryptographic hashes to make sure that only real iTunes instances can swap audio with each other. This key has been broken multiple times, hence there are now a couple of alternative DAAP implementations, which can swap audio with iTunes (Rhythmbox being one example). However, with iTunes 7 Apple changed the cryptographic key once again, and until now nobody managed to break it.
So basically, Apple now dongles AirPorts to iTunes, iTunes to iTunes and iTunes to iPods. The whole Apple eco-system of media devices and software is dongled together. And none of the current iterations of the underlying technologies have been fully broken yet.
While the audio files you can buy at the iTunes shop may now be DRM-free, you're still locked into the Apple eco-system if you do that. They replaced DRM with vendor lock-in.
This lock-in behaviour is childish at best. DAAP once was the de-facto standard for swapping media files in LANs. Swapping files in LANs is perfectly legitimate and legal. Then, Microsoft/Intel started to include a similar technology in UPnP, the UPnP MediaServer. An open technology that has now been included in endless media server devices. Several Free Software implementations exist (most notably gUPnP). These days, uPNP MediaServer is ubiquitous, DAAP is no more. Apple had the much better starting position, but they blew it, because of their childish locking-out of alternative implementations.
I believe that DAAP is the superior protocol in comparison to UPnP MediaServer. (Not really surprising, since I wrote most of Avahi, which is a free implementation of mDNS/DNS-SD ("Zeroconf"), the (open) Apple technology that is the basis for DAAP.) However, due to the closedness of DAAP I would recommend everyone to favour UPnP MediaServer over DAAP. It's a pity.
Both DAAP and UPnP MediaServer are transfer protocols, nothing that is ever directly exposed to the user. Right now, Free Software media players support DAAP much better than UPnP MediaServer. Hopefully, they will start to abstract the differences away, and allow swapping music the same way over DAAP and over uPnP. And hopefully, DAAP will eventually die or Apple will open it. They have shown that they are able to change for the good, they became much more open with WebKit, and they changed the license of Bonjour to a real Free Software license. Let's hope they will eventually notice that locking users in makes their own technology irrelevant in the long term.
Oh, and let's hope that Jon finds the time to break all remaining Apple crypto keys! Jon, DAAP 7.0, and the RAOP server key is waiting for you! I'd love to make PulseAudio RAOP-compatible, both as client and as server.
