Recently rumors of the iPhone phoning home to Apple and reporting back on what you’ve done to your iPhone have been swirling around the blogosphere. All these rumors started with one little vague comment from Zdziarski which he wants to set the record straight about.
Zdziarski found that the iPhone 2.0’s GPS program fetches a blacklist for Apps from Apple’s servers at the following host ‘iphone-services.apple.com’ and stores the list in a cache file located in ‘/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/’. This has now been confirmed by Apple’s famed CEO Steve Jobs in a recent Wall Street Journal article (Google News link so you can read the whole article) when asked about the existence of an App kill switch Jobs responded “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,”
Zdziarski successfully tested the use of the blacklist by killing some of his Apps.
With a little DNS spoofing, I fed my own list into the iPhone and effectively killed (by name) applications that attempt to use the GPS. It looks like that’s all it’s set to do right now, but I may just not have found the “vaporize” switch.
