Apple TVs not disabled by Apple, hackers march on

A little more than a week ago, someone started the dirty little rumor that Apple was remotely disabling Apple TV units that had been hacked, via the device's network connection. As we've all seen, hacking the little white box is as easy as pie, so I suppose it would make sense to discourage modifications, though it would be so very un-Apple of them. Well, the truth was bound to surface sooner or later and the word from the horse's mouth is that Apple is not disabling Apple TVs via some sort of mysterious backdoor. The company's official stance is that they really don't care what you do with your Apple TV, as long as you realize that opening it up voids the warranty. This leads us to assume that those few failed units may have been bricked the old fashioned way: by inexperienced hackers tooling around with their device's innards.

Meanwhile, the Apple TV hacking community soldiers on. Some enterprising folks have gotten RSS feeds and old-school videogame emulators up and running on the device while Linux enthusiasts are hard at work, trying to get their platform of choice up and running on the set-top box. But what of the one hack that every Apple TV longs for, support for external storage via the USB ports? There's still no word of a successful hack though enthusiast website Apple TV Hacks is offering a $1000 reward to anyone who can devise one. Hackers, start your engines.

For more on Apple TV hacks:
- see this Engadget post on Apple's stance
- this story on the Linux on Apple TV project
- this story on new hacks
- and collect your $1000 bounty at Apple TV Hacks