Coming home today to watch some content on Giant Bomb via my hacked Apple TV 2G, I found that the device was resetting itself after running for only a couple of minutes. At /var/log/syslog, I found:

Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.1
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8M90z
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: T:[0xae15000] SWU: Attempt to back/no-rev from 4.2.1/8C154 to 4.1/8M90z rejected.
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.2.1
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8C154
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS 4.2.1 with 4.3
Mar  9 19:16:34 Apple-TV /Applications/AppleTV.app/AppleTV[406]: VERS: comparing OS build 8C154 with 8F191m
Mar  9 19:19:33 Apple-TV ReportCrash[426]: Formulating crash report for process AppleTV[406]

I knew that I had disabled Apple TV updates via a setting in the NitoTV menu, but the check still seemed to be occurring. On the XBMC Forums I found the solution: Checks were being made against the server mesu.apple.com, which NitoTV looped back to 127.0.0.1 by editing /etc/hosts – but that loopback somehow was not in effect. Removing the extra carriage return in /etc/hosts after the entry for menu.apple.com did the trick.

If you’d like to simply download and replace your hosts file, I’ve put mine up for download here – enjoy.