Today Steve Jobs has come out in person and confirmed the “kill switch” rumor. He says, and I quote, “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” He said that this I not routinely used but that it is capable of completely deleting the application or code that is “malicious”. Now this is what he tells the media, but I also believe that it is to try to control unauthorized applications, or at least do something to them, like Cydia or Installer perhaps? Anyways, he goes on to say that the “kill switch” is just a precaution, and that they haven’t had to use it yet.
Not only did Steve Jobs talk about the “kill switch” but he went on to talk about the App Store. He went on to say that the App Store has earned Apple a revenue of $30 million, and about 60 million applications were downloaded since the App Store’s launch on July 10th. Now remember, $30 million s just for Apple, Apple’s developers get 70% of the pie here, so total estimated revenue is about $100 million just this last month! That’s incredible! Steve says that by this years end, Apple would have a revenue of $360 million. And he finally goes to say “Phone differentiation used to be about radios and antennas and things like that, We think, going forward, the phone of the future will be differentiated by software”
-Alan Vazquez
oh fun so what inside every iphone is a lil kill switch that can “kill” whatever they want????
or does pwnage really knock it out?
truehybridx: Yeah that’s the basic idea. So they have the power to completely destroy whatever they want. And yes Pwnage is the only thing that can disable this mechanism. Well, no I lied, Pwnage isn’t the thing that does it, it helps, but unlocking your iPhone is what disables it. The mechanism depends on the baseband and the carrier that you are on. So if you’ve unlocked an iPhone and are on T-Mobile, the mechanism can’t do it’s job because it also depends on AT&T’s cellular network.
If you think about it, it is kinda like SSH.
gee it takes a month if i SSH thru edge from my comp lol and they doing that
if only we coudl rig up a feedback loop to break them 😛
Well, for them it takes about 20 seconds because they are in your iPhone directly and constantly if they wish. Well theoretically yeah, you could break their connection. Illegal of course, but it would work, in theory of course.
hey, does this affect the originals as well, or is it just 3g?
Especially the iPhone 3G. Both of them are affected.
so im wondering though.. since we are obviously running bsd on our iphones, do you think we could use packet filtering, or firewalling to block the ip masks of those coming from apple? i would think there would be a way to filter traffic that comes in. i dunno though. is it a hardware switch, or a software switch? if its software, customize the firmware a little more than it already is on jailbroken/unlocked phones, no big deal. if its hardware, obviously thats going to be a little more complicated.
Well for sure it’s software, but there is a debate as to the iPhone 3G, people believe that the iPhone 3G also has a hardware mechanism if the software fails to do it’s job. Well, apparently the Pwnage process will customize the firmware enough that it will block the mechanism. There is a way to filter packets. I have done it before, but you need a jailbroken iPhone/iPhone 3G/iPod touch, MobileTerminal.app, and an application that can send files through e-mail from like /private/var/mobile/media I’ve done it before. It is possible, but I have only accomplished this in 1.1.4, it is very tricky to do, but it is possible.