Count me amongst the "it's a checksum, get over it" brigade; hashes don't get "broken" in the same way that public/private keypairs, or hashed-passwords do[1] - they are computed/recomputed from information which is in cleartext. Nobody's mentioned going more than ripping a few plaintext bytes out of an executable and mixing the iPod's hardware address (or something similar) into the mix.

It'd be up to a Judge to work out whether that's forging a credential or some such, and he'd probably be looking at "intent" to make a decision.

Frankly, I'm more surprised at the implication that the databases formerly didn't have something like that.

My bet is that it has arisen with the prevalence of flash-memory iPods, as spinning rust has more obvious failure modes - like being dead, for instance.

[1] Google "john the ripper" or "RSA155" for examples