thomas fitzgerald.net

If you ever wanted proof that modern society is a little paranoid, then look no further than the mass hysteria created by the folks over at Tutorial Ninjas when they reported that their SSH fiddling on their Apple TV had been mysteriously reset over night.

“Several of us over in the Awkward TV IRC(l0rdr0ck, myself, and others) have had our Mod’d Apple TV’s played with over night(SSH/VNC disabled), our guess is apple has started to fight back the mod’d Apple TV’s. This is a warning to all of you to block your Apple TV from the internet by going into your routers settings and denying it internet access!
This does mean Apple may have the power to update your Apple TV, without you knowing it!”

Rather than the obvious thought that there are simple automatic repair scripts running on the device, they made the giant leap to come to the conclusion that Apple are mysteriously and secretively hacking into your Apple TV at night to reset your system to its default settings.

Can anyone really picture an army of Apple employees sitting in a darkened building hidden within the bowels of Cupertino, hooked up to caffeine drips, staring at their 30 inch cinema displays, waiting for a signal from a lone distant Apple TV that it has been hacked, so they can spring to life, stealthily hack back into your AppleTV and reset the system, disappearing into the night, leaving no trace of their secret mission? No, I didn’t think so. Im guessing Apple really don’t care that much.

But the worst thing about this story, is not the initial conclusion jumping exercise by the people who discovered that their devices had reset themselves, it is the fact that a whole bunch of news sites picked up on it as evidence of a dark cruel big brother side to Apple. No one seemed content with the far more likely scenario. So, based on the supposition of one hacker, with no back up evidence what so ever, you are seeing headlines like: “Apple Hacks the Hackers” , “Apple locking out modded Apple TVs?” and my personal favourite “Did Apple install a rootkit in Apple TV?”. The consensus amongst almost every sane person is that this is just a automated repair script running on the device, which will undoubtedly be overcome in a day or so. The hysterical reporters and bloggers out there need to chill a bit. Remember the device has only been available to the public for a little over a week now.

UPDATE:
Freaky Coincidence: Dan Moren over at Mac User posted similar thoughts. This whole story does invoke images of 1960’s James Bond or The Incredibles every time you read it. Seriously, it really is ridiculous to think Apple are hacking into Apple TVs to hack them back.

To mis-quote Homer: Hackers, is there anything they can’t do.

For more on how to do this visit AppleTVHacks.net

Technorati Tags: AppleTV

Macworld’s Chris Breen has a good set of questions and answers about the Apple TV.

“After being tethered to Apple’s recently released television add-on since last Thursday, all that is Apple TV is beginning to make itself clear. You have questions? I have answers.”

Read

It seems amazing that in the short amount of time it has been in the public’s hands, hackers have managed to do all sorts of wonderful things with Apple’s tiny AppleTV. The key seems to be the fact that it is running a “lite” version of OSX which can be easily patched with bits from the full version. So far clever tinkerers have managed to replace the drive, enable xvid and divx, enable ssh for remote access, get vlc running on it (why?) and my personal favorite, enable the Apache web server, turning the AppleTV into what has to be the worlds smallest (and potentially most useless) web server.

You can find all of these hacks detailed on the aptly named AppleTV Hacks.

Fantastic

Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleTV

Image courtesy of Apple

As has become a regular occurrence with any Apple product launch, the announcement from Apple that their new set top box, the Apple TV is finally shipping has been greeted by the usual round of negativity and doom saying from industry analysts and industry competitors. Once again eager journalists are trading on Apple’s popularity, hoping to be the one to break the story of Apple’s first major failure since the iPod skyrocketed the computer and consumer electronics manufacturer to superstardom. A growing chorus (most of whom probably haven’t even laid their hands on the product) are convinced the Apple TV will be a failure. Like the iPod and more recently the iPhone, they simply fail to grasp the product, fail to understand how it could possibly be a success when it seems less feature-complete that competing products. The Apple TV however is truly groundbreaking for a number of reasons, and unfortunately for them, competitors and journalists are locked into the old way of thinking, and will be scratching their heads in a year or two when the Apple TV is a huge success, wondering how this ever slipped passed them.

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