Showing just how hard it is to protect any data, once it's in digital form and widely distributed, Nils Schneider, a 17-year-old computer science student from Germany, reverse engineered the code to the iPod bootloader by encoding it into a series of audible clicks. Schneider used the piezoelectric component within the iPod to produce the clicks, loaded the results onto another computer, and then proceeded to reverse engineer the bootloader. Clever.
Why do this? To get Linux booting on the newest series of iPods, of course.