The hacking (and successes) continue! The latest achievement is booting AppleTV off an external drive. You can see the video here (http://www.ozy.us/stuff/ExternalBootOnAppleTV.mov). Although it apparently does not completely work, what this means, once the technique is improved, is that you can then modify AppleTV all you want without having to open it or even do anything difficult -- probably just download some files or a disk image, write them to a spare harddrive and connect it to the AppleTV.

However, from the way things are going, you may need to wait a couple of days for all this to happen. ;)