Zune hacked to play friendly with Macs

Maybe you’re suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. You went out and bought a Powerbook because of those nifty Mac vs. PC commercials, but then you’re also drooling over your new Microsoft Zune. In the words of George Costanza, “Worlds are colliding! Worlds are colliding!” Someone has hacked Microsoft’s portable media player to sync up to a Mac… sort of.

As you may already know, the Zune is extremely loyal to the first computer it syncs up with, treating all other computers “as hostile entities and will not allow access to the Zune data without a total reformat/rehost.” While you still won’t be able to do any file transfers to a Mac, you can exploit Microsoft’s Media Transfer Protocol. By using WentNet’s open source and free XNJB utility, you can at least look up what is stored on the Zune.

Baby steps. Baby steps.