No one could of seen this one coming (cough). Apple has embedded a remote kill switch in the iPhone’s operating system that allows them to deactivate applications of their choosing — including applications which were knowingly installed by an iPhone’s owner. According to Wired’s Gadget Lab:
Jonathan Zdrianski, author of the book iPhone Open Application Development, discovered a URL hidden in iPhone’s CoreLocation that he believes the iPhone uses to check whether any apps on your phone match with those listed in a database of blacklisted applications. Presumably, that would allow Apple to remotely de-authorize those apps, or perhaps even delete them.
A few days later, Steve Jobs confirmed Zdrianski’s beliefs and presumptions about the remote kill switch:
[Jobs] confirmed that it is indeed possible for Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable malicious applications. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he told the WSJ. An example of a malicious application would be one that stole users’ personal information, Jobs explained. [emphasis added]
Malicious applications?? Since “malicious” is a highly subjective classification, exactly who will be deciding what is malicious and how? Something tells me (history) that Apple and AT&T will be privately deciding what applications are harmful to their business interests, and that this blacklist won’t be available for public viewing. I’m sure Apple will utilized the remote kill switch to disable some applications that I would consider malicious, that is, applications that aggregate my personal information without my knowledge. But what about the malicious applications who sign contracts with either Apple or AT&T in order to aggregate my personal information? I would still consider those applications malicious, but I doubt Apple or AT&T would.
Yes, Apple just wants to “protect” us with this remote kill switch, and they have to create a “secure” environment so that people will feel “safe” enough to buy as many apps as their consumerist hearts desire — Yet, I’ve somehow managed just fine over the past 8 years without having Apple install a remote kill switch on my laptop’s OS and I imagine the great majority of you have as well. The fact that Apple is deciding to censor what applications I can and can not install on my iPhone and clearly monitoring what I do with my iPhone makes me feel a lot less safe and a lot less secure. That’s not just bad ethics, it’s bad business, and its making the idea of android much more appealing to me.
As Lawrence Lessig put it — code is law — and Apple and AT&T are taking the long arm of the law into their own, err… hands. Add this to the fact that the recently passed FISA Amendments Act of 2008 effectively creates an infrastructure for a police-state by allowing the government to wiretap and aggregate all telecommunications, and its easy to see how that infrastructure will extend into our mobile communication technologies.
apple’s long-arm tactics
No one could of seen this one coming (cough). Apple has embedded a remote kill switch in the iPhone’s operating system that allows them to deactivate applications of their choosing — including applications which were knowingly installed by an iPhone’s owner. According to Wired’s Gadget Lab:
Jonathan Zdrianski, author of the book iPhone Open Application Development, discovered a URL hidden in iPhone’s CoreLocation that he believes the iPhone uses to check whether any apps on your phone match with those listed in a database of blacklisted applications. Presumably, that would allow Apple to remotely de-authorize those apps, or perhaps even delete them.
A few days later, Steve Jobs confirmed Zdrianski’s beliefs and presumptions about the remote kill switch:
[Jobs] confirmed that it is indeed possible for Apple to reach into your phone from afar and disable malicious applications. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he told the WSJ. An example of a malicious application would be one that stole users’ personal information, Jobs explained. [emphasis added]
Malicious applications?? Since “malicious” is a highly subjective classification, exactly who will be deciding what is malicious and how? Something tells me (history) that Apple and AT&T will be privately deciding what applications are harmful to their business interests, and that this blacklist won’t be available for public viewing. I’m sure Apple will utilized the remote kill switch to disable some applications that I would consider malicious, that is, applications that aggregate my personal information without my knowledge. But what about the malicious applications who sign contracts with either Apple or AT&T in order to aggregate my personal information? I would still consider those applications malicious, but I doubt Apple or AT&T would.
Yes, Apple just wants to “protect” us with this remote kill switch, and they have to create a “secure” environment so that people will feel “safe” enough to buy as many apps as their consumerist hearts desire — Yet, I’ve somehow managed just fine over the past 8 years without having Apple install a remote kill switch on my laptop’s OS and I imagine the great majority of you have as well. The fact that Apple is deciding to censor what applications I can and can not install on my iPhone and clearly monitoring what I do with my iPhone makes me feel a lot less safe and a lot less secure. That’s not just bad ethics, it’s bad business, and its making the idea of android much more appealing to me.
As Lawrence Lessig put it — code is law — and Apple and AT&T are taking the long arm of the law into their own, err… hands. Add this to the fact that the recently passed FISA Amendments Act of 2008 effectively creates an infrastructure for a police-state by allowing the government to wiretap and aggregate all telecommunications, and its easy to see how that infrastructure will extend into our mobile communication technologies.