Once upon a time, news about Apple was all about computers. Computers, computers, computers. But now the fastest-moving news is about the iPhone.
First up is the apparent discovery of a subsite within the Apple site where, it seems, phones can call home to see whether an application needs to be nuked. Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the book iPhone Open Application Development and an iPhone Forensics manual (odd, we thought there as a ban on discussing programming for the iPhone) says there's a blacklisting mechanism built into the iPhone.
The page is at https://iphone-services.apple.com/clbl/unauthorizedApps - though you'll see from looking at it that it's just a proof of concept. But it does sit within Apple's domain. Might work; might not. Has anyone caught their iPhone phoning home to it, though? That's what's not clear.
Update: John Gruber, who has "an informed source at Apple", says that it's actually for banning apps from using the Core Location API (which tells you where you are): that's what the "clbl" in the URL stands for ("core location blacklist"). Which reduces the breadth of the banning, but still leave it there.
And the other news is that a madly-overpriced application - Make Me Rich, costing a mere $999 - has been pulled from the iPhone App Store. Not surprisingly, it wasn't popular, since all it basically did was to, um, make the author rich. (There was also something about "'features a "secret mantra' that 'may help you to to [sic] stay rich, healthy and successful.'") And it didn't please some of the people who accidentally bought it - see the comment in the picture above.
Armin Heinrich, the author, would be sitting quite pretty from a few sales, you'd think. That might be wrong: if people buy it on their credit card and then claim it back as an erroneous (or fraudulent?) transaction, Apple has already taken its 30% cut ($300, near enough) but Heinrich has to pay back the full $999 to the credit card company. So he ends up $300 out of pocket. Oh dear. I am rich? I was rich, now I'm not. That's quite a maneouvre.
But so far, no sign of I Am Rich on the app-killing page. I don't think Steve Jobs would really green-light such a move, anyhow.
