iPhone includes app 'kill switch,' Jobs admitsSwitch necessary as a last-ditch option, says JobsBy Gregg Keizer Framingham | Tuesday, 12 August, 2008Apple's CEO Steve Jobs has confirmed that the company has a "kill switch" it can flip to remotely disable potentially malicious applications that have been downloaded to any iPhone.In a story published on Monday morning by the Wall Street Journal, Jobs acknowledged that Apple could cripple applications previously downloaded to iPhone and iPod touch devices.The so-called "kill switch" is necessary, Jobs argued, as a last-ditch option if a malicious application slipped through Apple's checks and made it onto the App Store. "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull," Jobs told the newspaper.Apple controls which applications appear on its App Store.Discussion of the switch started last week when Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher and author of a pair of books about iPhone development, said he had found a line in the phone's operating system that pointed to a URL. The link, said Zdziarski, led to a page that appeared to be an embryonic blacklist.The URL, which points to an Apple server, currently contains only placeholder data.Later, Zdziarski updated his site with more information. "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," he said last Thursday.
