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This sounds more like a physical security problem to me: If you care about the contents of your iPod you shouldn't leave it attached to a machine that untrusted users (your kids :-), judging from the thread at the hal mailing list) can physically access.
If the kids mess with the iPod while it is charging, that's one thing. I can lay the iPod out of sight and out of mind. They generally leave my belongings alone anyway.
These kids are my little brothers (10 to 15) that come to visit about once a month or so, and have learning disabilities due to drug use of their birth mothers (victimless crime my arse ...)
They like to play tux racer, look up PS2 cheat codes, etc. And they are a testimony to how easy Linux is as a desktop for those who don't think it is suppose to be hard to use ;)
A mounted fat32 (no *nix file permissions) that mounts rw for any user - I'm not sure I like that - not for something like a media player that is most likely to contain data specific to a particular user.
Anyone want to hack the iPod to support ext2? ;)
I'll just use autofs for the time being, I prefer the app to mount/ unmount on demand anyway - if hal does not yet do that and it would be troublesome to add it before FC{4,5}, then autofs is the right tool for me at the moment. I won't file a RFE bug. I get the impression though that hal is intended to replace it.
