'Tasers set to stun' says discoverer of iPhone 'kill switch'

Stephen Withers
Friday, 08 August 2008 11:53

Business IT - Technology

While Zdziarski suspects that the software includes a mechanism to delete rather than merely disable blacklisted applications or that such functionality may be added in a later version, he has found no evidence that is the case.

"It looks like tasers are only set to 'stun' right now, but that may just be because I haven't found the knob to vaporize the app," wrote Zdziarski.

"This may [his emphasis] have been added to provide a way to ban GPS navigation software, which Apple has restricted from the AppStore," he speculated.

That sounds very plausible to me. After all, the blacklist is cached in the /var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/ directory, Apple explicitly disallows applications for real-time route guidance under the iPhone SDK licence agreement, and Zdziarski's own experiment suggest the 'kill switch' targets applications using GPS.

But fears that the mechanism allows Apple to arbitrarily remove any application from its customers' iPhones seem to be unfounded - at least for now.