A hacker has found the public key for Apple’s Airport Express hardware and posted it online. What that means is that it’s now possible to stream media from iTunes directly to third party software without using Airport Express or other licensed hardware.
In other words, developers can write apps that will stream music from iTunes running on a PC to another computer in your household, or to a mobile device. Or say you have a PC running the XBMC media center app in the living room and you want to stream media from the Mac in your office to the home theater PC. This hack makes that possible without using an Airport Express.
It’s also theoretically possible that third party hardware could use the public key to act as an AirTunes device — but it’s not likely that any hardware makers will take that step since it could potentially anger the folks at Apple. Still, the software potential is pretty big.
The guy who found the public key created an Airport Express emulator app called ShairPort.
via Hacker News
