Apple Hacks Back

It doesn’t take long after a product hits the shelves for it to be dissected, broken and bent to the will of one or the other, and the Apple TV was no different. Within a week, the little box had been taken apart and reconfigured to do things that Apple never meant it to do. However, it looks like this time, Apple had the upper hand.

After a long and complicated process, the people at Tutorialninjas.com were happy with their new Apple TV and dreaming of what new things they might be able to make it do. Unfortunately, while they were sleeping, big, bad Apple came and reset their boxes. It might sound like something out of a storybook, but it isn’t. Apparently, upon waking up in the morning, the hackers founds that several of their mods had been undone overnight. Upon discovering that SSH and VNC had been disabled, the cries of foul quickly followed.

The hackers claim that Apple is fighting back against the hackers by remotely accessing the machines and resetting them. They warn any and all modders to isolate the little box from the Internet and reset its password in order to lock Apple out. However, amidst the rising fear of the ‘Apple backdoor’ it looks like the explanation might be a very mundane one: automatic scheduled repairs. These tasks, commonly referred to as ‘cronjobs’ help keep the machine healthy and are present in all flavors of OS X. Since the software that runs the Apple TV is a stripped down version of OS X, and considering the initial reports of the hard drive contents, including a copy of the OS for repair purposes, it seems much more likely that we are looking at self repairs.

While the cronjob is a much more plausible explanation for the repairs done to the Apple TVs, this is yet unconfirmed and it may very well be that there are other security measures in place that check the integrity of the box over the Internet.

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