Slashdot posts a story about ‘Hacking the Streamium’ — the Streamium is an ‘internet micro hi-fi’ made by Philips. The poster writes ‘the main gripes (are) that Philips controls which Internet radio stations you can listen to and that the PC-link software … only runs on Windows. I managed to fix both of these problems by reverse engineering the PC-link protocol and writing my own pc-link server in perl, which can be run on practically any OS, *and* can trick the Streamium into playing any Internet MP3 stream that you want’.
A quick look at his page notes ‘the protocol consists of fairly simple xml tags’. It sure does; I’d imagine it took all of 5 minutes with a tcpdump reversing that! In fact, it looks so easy to reverse-engineer, you’d have to wonder if the engineers at Philips weren’t hoping something like this might happen ;)