Apple Core is a company which sells Apple Televisions with upgraded hard drives and, until yesterday, a very handy tiny USB stick called aTV Flash.
The thumb drive was a plug and play solution to hack your Apple TV, bringing a slew of extra features for just $60.00 USD. After restoring your Apple TV to factory defaults, you slip in the aTV. It goes to work and installs all the extra software needed.
Because the process is reversible (just do another factory restore) and it doesn’t involve physically opening the Apple Television, it doesn’t void your warranty.
Here are the features, as listed by MacMerc:
- Play most video formats (DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, RMVB + more)
- Play DVD files WITHOUT converting them [ripped VOB files]
- Sync, organize and watch non-iTunes video files
- Browse the web with a Safari b ased web browser
- Rent & watch Hi-Def movies from Jaman.com
- Stream media from UPnP(v1) media servers
- View local weather forecasts
- View RSS Feeds
- Enable SSH access
As you can see, a pretty significant upgrade. Yesterday, however, Apple Core stopped selling the device:
Due to questions arising regarding the fair use of a particular file present on the aTV Flash, and conflicting thoughts as to whether or not it falls under the fair use category, we’ve VOLUNTARILY discontinued offering the aTV Flash at this time.
In our interpretation of the fair use doctrine, our software does not cross any lines, but since this is a grey area issue, we have taken a proactive approach and decided to seek clarifcation directly from the rights holder before we offer the product again. We’re working with them to resolve this, and will have updates posted here as they become available.
Interestingly, all of the tools included on the drive are available elsewhere. The aTV just packages them and does the heavy lifting for you.
It’s hard to tell from Apple Core’s statement whether Apple has put pressure on them, or whether the litigious environment in the US made the company jittery (the new version has received a lot of recent publicity).
I imagine the smart thing to do, though, would be to release the software package as a download and let the evil hacking criminal consumers copy it to our own thumb drive 
Source: Apple Core, LLC
Tags: apple, Hacking, Technology
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