In an effort to justify blowing $399 on a portable digital music device (surely the nicest portable digital music device available, but a portable digital music device all the same), iPod owners are often prone to rationalizing their purchases by noting ways they can use them above and beyond the relatively frivolous "it lets me listen to lots of music." The most obvious secondary usage is as a portable FireWire hard drive, for instance. Plus, the back's all shiny, so you can use it as a mirror, and it's just the right size to serve as one classy paperweight.

But here's a justification we hadn't seen before: spend $399 on an iPod, and you can use it to steal thousands of dollars in software. Faithful viewer Looking For Work (maybe it's just us, Looking, but if we were you, we'd probably go by our initials or a nickname or something) pointed us towards a Wired article which details how one enterprising young thief sauntered casually into a CompUSA, plugged his iPod into a display Mac, dragged a copy of Office v.X to his shiny musical companion, unplugged, and then sauntered back out again with $500 bucks worth of pirated productivity software in his pocket. Provided you don't mind not having physical media, the accompanying documentation, a valid license, or any sense of shame, why, an iPod can pay for itself in mere minutes!

Indeed, the fact that the iPod is a tiny, bus-powered FireWire hard drive with a 4.6 GB capacity (minus whatever space one has chewed up with tunes) does in fact make it just about the perfect tool for this sort of theft. FireWire is fast enough that copying 200 MB of Office takes under a minute, so the thief is in and out before the staff notices anything amiss. Then again, given that we've seen in Viewer Mail that CompUSA employees can be so clueless that shoplifters occasionally walk off with entire Power Mac G4s completely undetected, one could probably pull off this sort of data heist with USB as well. Heck, if the hardware supported it, maybe even via RS-232 serial, or infrared.

Now, before any of you go making any rash accusations that you'll later regret, we here at the AtAT compound would like to point out that our own iPods are so crammed full of music-- legally obtained music, we might add-- that we've barely got enough space left to squeeze on a copy of SimpleText, let alone any of Microsoft's bloatware. Incidentally, what do you suppose that kid had been listening to on his iPod when he walked into that store? Our money's on "Been Caught Stealing" by Jane's Addiction, but it's been said we've got an overdeveloped sense of irony.