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(Image courtesy of Engadget)
If there’s one thing hackers love more than anything, it’s a new device to perform their trickery upon -- and this week, the focus appears to be on Apple’s refreshed Apple TV box, which appears to be possibly more hacker-friendly than the original version thanks to its iOS roots.
Engadget is reporting that the hacker community has made some interesting progress with the new Apple TV, which is barely in stores let alone in most preorder customers’ hands. We already reported yesterday that the Apple TV’s “LowTide” interface has been ported to the iPod touch by one user, while TUAW reader Arix has managed to get the ATV’s AirPlay daemon onto their jailbroken iPhone 3GS, “thus allowing it to receive AirPlay streams” as seen in the video below.
The most intriguing bit of ATV hacker news involves the box’s Micro USB port. As you may recall, Apple claimed that the full USB port on the original Apple TV was for service only, but hackers managed to get it running for external storage. Apple is still towing the same company line for the updated box, but it appears the diminutive port may have another purpose as well.
“The best news of all, perhaps, is the ability to restore the Apple TV in iTunes by connecting its micro-USB port to your computer,” Engadget reveals. “That means that existing PC and Mac-based jailbreak tools can be updated to work over the connection. In fact, TinyUmbrella has already been updated to backup the Apple TV’s SHSH blobs in order to preserve your ability to downgrade in the future.”
It appears that Apple’s “cat and mouse game” with the hackers will now continue beyond the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad and into the new Apple TV, which may be more open to tweaking than the original box (and that’s saying a lot). Given the new ATV’s 8GB of onboard flash storage, we say, “Let the games begin!”
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