The Apple TV hacks are coming fast and furious as recorded on both the Something Awful thread we already told you about, and at the Apple TV Hacks blog. Over at Something Awful, user macado shows the Apple TV successfully decoding a 720p XviD clip using the open source VLC player (though only for 6 minutes). Other users have demonstrated Firefox and iTunes running on an Apple TV as well. Meanwhile at Apple TV Hacks, there are already tutorials up on getting SSH and AFP access and even setting up Remote Desktop (VNC) and Apache.

In short, the Apple TV has been busted wide open and is well on its way to being hacked into a general purpose (if rather underpowered) mini Mac mini (Mac nano, perhaps?), running OS X 10.4.7 as you can see above. For those of you with a hankering to break your warranties, it looks like the Apple TV is eminently hackable and has a lot of potential.

[Via Apple TV Hacks]

Update: the 6 minute thing has to do with the fact that the Apple TV automatically resets after 6 minutes (see the comments below).

Headdress is a nifty little application that makes turning on and off PHP very easy, but that's not all. It also takes care of modifying the Apache config files, so your little old Mac can serve up a number of websites (locally) without you having to worry about nesting files or anything like that.

Headdress will setup 2 sites before you have to register for $14.95.

[via What Do I Know Enjoying]

Last Thursday Silicon.com found out that Apple's Korean online store was hacked. The hacking was done by a dude going by the name 'Dinam.' He claims to be Turkish, but there is no way to confirm that. It seems he gained administrative control over the webserver (which was running Apache) that serves up the Apple store (in Korea) and he went ahead and defaced the website.

One of the very first cool things I learned about the guts of OS X was the existence of Apache, an industrial-strength web server, built in to the OS. O'Reilly has a nice piece on getting started with Apache, so start there if you're new to web serving on your Mac. Imagine hosting your own pages for your own home intranet. Now take that one step further, and imagine dynamic pages, ones capable of accessing data from the web or your machine, on your home network (or using DynDNS, anywhere).

I'm going to point out a few resources for getting started using Apache and PHP on your Mac. You'll find the combination powerful, and getting up to speed is relatively simple. There's some programming involved, so if you're scared of that sort of thing, check out How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. Granted, you'll be learning Python, but guess what? You can use Python on your Mac as well. Python goes beyond  web programming, and is a great language to get familiar with. If you want to learn PHP, check out Webmonkey's PHP section, or W3 School's PHP intro.

Apple has a page on getting PHP working on your Mac. It's a nice article too, with a step-by-step building of a page to view your iTunes library, complete with plenty of XML goodness as well. The problem here is the version of PHP that comes with your Mac is generally a version behind the current release. While PHP 4.3 was nice, version 5 adds some great stuff. The version of Apache shipping with your Mac probably isn't the latest rev of that either, so check out phpmac's tutorial on installing Apache 2.20 and PHP 5.1.2. It's only for OS X version 10.4.4, but it'll still work with 10.4.5 (no warranty expressed or implied, back up your data, etc.).

Once you have more current versions up and running, try out some of those programming resources, and try building apps. I think you'll find while Apache keeps your Mac acting like a great web page server, PHP can turn your private pages into real network apps. What's really great about setting up PHP on your Mac isn't just a home network, but being able to build and test web apps too, all from the comfort of your favorite OS.