Apple pulls jailbreak detection API

Trusted by whom ?

"once the device is jailbroken, nothing the OS says can be trusted"

It seems Apple is more interested in whether those who can ensure applications are installed on the device can trust it rather more than whether or not users can. These 2 trust properties are not the same.

Take the issue of data protection for example. I might have various Android apps which can use the GPS to report where I am. If I deny GPS access to an app because of what I don't want it to do, it may not do anything at all including what I do want it to do. So I may prefer to have one app think I am in one place and another think I am elsewhere. In this situation I have very good reason to hack the system call or class library which accesses my location from the GPS device. The Data Protection Act and Computer Misuse Act are both very clear on my rights, but if the only way I can exercise these is if no location aware app on my phone works at all, then access to the potential benefits of GPS are denied.

So whose computer is it anyway ?

Corporate?

"more important in a corporate setting"

Except Apple's own policies specifically exclude the iPhone from Business use

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/24/iphone_apps_not_for_business/

Anyone else want to take a dig at the fanbois?

To save time, the inevitable

Blah blah iPhan, blah blah Lemon 4, blah blah feeling threatened, blah blah Steve Jobs stole my bike..

There, the "JaitcH" nonsense is out of the way, so we can concentrate on proper tinfoul hattery :)

@Annihilator

realms of reality? You need to get out of Jobs Reality distortion field (RDF). Ever read the agreement you agreed on? And in what universe the law has ever served for people?

Reality:

1. you do NOT own your iPhone, Apple does.

2. Gov and big companies don't give a damn about what the law says, and there is nothing you can do about it.

3. just because Apple doesn't lose money on jailbreak iDevices, it doesn't mean they won't do anything about it. The simple fact is Apple or Steve himself absolutely hate jailbreak.

I'm not saying Google (or insert any company name you see fit) is much better, they all have their own RDF.

Pedantic grammar alert

"many of the latter like to think of themselves as the former "

You mentioned three types of application, so by implication three types of owner. Therefore it's first, middle and last.

No Mr Michael C

It is you who doesn't understand what you are talking about.

You see, you misunderstood the difference between Gov servant and Gov. Unless you are politician or who is in charge of what really happening, you are just like me, who serve the gov of the day. We cannot break the law ourselves, we are accountable for what we do.

Politicians are above the law, big companies are above the law. Matter of fact, they are the ones who make the law to serve themselves.

The good people you were talking about, are simple slaves who fight to survive. We do what our masters asked for. I never doubt or disagree with you on this point. However, slaves are not in charge with anything. Slaves follow the rules set by masters.

The masters are the ones who do evils. And there is NOTHING you or any one of us can do about it.

Take recent wikileak event as example, why US of A gov in particular hated wikilead so much, that they want to do anything to silent it. Why UK gov follows US command.

In tech sector, name one big company that doesn't do evil.

Tell me, what exactly we as people can do? "They" control everything. The worst part is there is nothing to replace them (you can only replace one politician with another, one greedy CEO with another greedy CEO). We only get different evils who we (as people collectively) serve as our masters. The choice we have, often at best is to choose the less of <insert the number> evils.

People do have power to force the masters' hand. However, people collectively are also too stupid to use this power. People only have power when people are united. Do you see that happens?

People no longer think or take responsibility anymore. People became too selfish, and "no one" will fight for rights anymore. People power or the so called "consumer power" you dreamed about, long ceased to exist.

Corporate iPhones probably want to know if they are jailbroken

There are some pretty scary iPhone apps out there - see http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ for some examples.

If you ran a business, you could be in one of two camps:

1. You might want to make sure that the iPhones you gave to your employees do not have such spyware installed on them, or else all corporate emails sent to/from the phone could be read by an unknown third party.

2. You might actually want to install such spyware on the iPhone yourself! You might want to see that the company iPhone is not being misused (or simply used for personal stuff when it shouldn't be), or that the employee is not down the pub when he says he's feeling sick.

For people in the first camp, how are you supposed to be able to tell if a device has been compromised, if the OS can't tell you? Given that the kind of checks you would need to do would be the sort of thing you can't do from a standard app's sandbox, you are pretty much buggered.

Conversely, the author is 100% correct in saying that once the phone is jailbroken, you can't trust anything the OS tells you, because the nice brightly-lit safe walled environment just became a large dark wide open space.

The only way you (as an employer handing out iPhones) can be sure that you know what state the iPhone is in, is to jailbreak it and put spyware on it yourself. I am sure that installing TWO bits of spyware on an iPhone would break something!

It's a bit like carrying your own bomb onto a plane because the chances of having *two* bombs on a plane are miniscule ...