There are other detectors you could use. You can use a simple photodiode too. But generally they don’t have the same sensitivity. Generally the sensitivity is t

There are other detectors you could use. You can use a simple photodiode too. But generally they don’t have the same sensitivity. Generally the sensitivity is too low for most radiation monitoring applications as I understand it. Steganographic storage would make sense, but the article mentions storing on a separate partition. So the tight integration still seems odd to me. Another comment suggested that they wanted to gain general “iPod” modification skills for other projects. That seems like an interesting idea. As an aside... I kind of like the idea of playing specific songs, or a sequence of songs to trigger a secondary processor (which is sampling frequencies played). This could potentially take over the USB port if necessary. That generation of iPods used hard drives, it was possible to replace those with smaller flash drives. This would give you a lot of space to add sensors/secondary compute. And could be done without coordinating with Apple. It does seem weird that they took the chance of this leaking too... and I would have thought they would have taken any other route possible.