The folks at Tutorial Ninjas created quite a stir by announcing last night that they’d gotten reports of a few modded Apple TVs being returned to their default state (i.e., all hacks rendered inoperable). Unfortunately, they then took a wild leap to Conclusion Island:
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!That’s it, I’m pulling their Netflix privileges. Somebody’s rented JFK way too many times.This does mean Apple may have the power to update your Apple TV, without you knowing it!
You should:
Change the password on your apple tv
Deny internet access to it.
Failure to do either could result in a breach in your network or a broken Apple TV’
We have no proof of apple doing this but i know of 4 cases in our IRC, and my startup script to disable the firewall got its permissions stripped!
On a scale of 1 to unlikely, this rates a “fluoride is a mind control substance introduced into our water supply by communists.” I love the idea that there’s this big Mission Control room in Cupertino, with a huge LCD screen where they’re monitoring all the Apple TVs in the world. So what, suddenly this red flashing blip appears on a map of the US, and someone yells “We’ve got a hacker in sector five! Initiate reversion procedure alpha-alpha-niner!”? Right.
Of course, this has already gotten picked up and flung bodily around the entire Internet, including some choice words from one of our favorite incendiary ZDNet bloggers (who we now refuse to link on principle—you know who I mean). More likely, as many have already suggested, this is some kind of maintenance cron script that runs a repair permissions command or some other disk cleanup that happens to break these mods. Should be pretty easy for anyone who’s opened up their Apple TV to confirm, so let us know.
It's been noted that Apple TV has a cron script that runs and does a diagnostic and returns everything to the Apple default settings. Apple is not unhacking machines by breaking into peoples networks.
John may be right. There are daily, weekly and monthly cron scripts that are run automatically.
I love it, these people have the wherewithal to hack their Apple TVs, but don't have the sense turn off or change the cron scripts LOL!