Kasperksy have found a fake Jailbreak utility for the iPhone 4.

The greenpois0n jailbreak utility is rumoured to be released any day now, but a malware laden fake is doing the rounds on torrent feeds and web sites, which doesn't jailbreak the phone, but steals usernames, passwords and other private data instead.

The fake jailbreaking software on websites is being sold for between $25 and $40.

This should concern Apple. If people want to do certain things with their iPhone but currently cannot because of Apple morality clauses it only harms Apple.

What? Apple will be loving this. They've always had to decry jailbreaking and now they can say 'if you jailbreak your phone, you run the risk of in fact installing malware and having the names and addresses of all your contacts sent to Lithuanian gangsters at your expense'.

I suspect the %age of people who have jailbroken phones is pretty small. I know many techies (I work in a building containing roughly 200 of them). Many of them have iPhones. Many of them spending their working lives tending systems built upon open source software - Apache, MySQL etc... I have never met one who has jailbroken their iphone. And these are the people who would actually care about whether their phone is 'open' or not and find getting the jailbreak software and following the procedure trivial. Can't see it being more popular in the general population somehow. There have been, what 10 million IPhones sold or some such? I'd be surprised if 1% have been broken. Apple still get paid for the phone if you jailbreak it. The amount you might have spent on apps is trivial compared to the amount you pay for the actual device - as it's recently been suggested Apple don't even make any profit from the app store themselves.. Apple make a show of stopping jailbreaking to keep the app developers and telcos happy but I suspect it's far from the top of their list of priorities.

Also these days a lot of people don't bother buying iPhones then jalbreaking them. if they want an open device they just buy an Android phone instead.

I do not want to jailbreak my Iphone when they finally get around to selling a white iPhone 4. But if people cannot do certain things legally like use apps which might be morally objectionable like iSnort, or some tethering to an iPad or laptop then people will be forced to jailbreak them. Yes this will be positive for now for Apple but if as you say the numbers of jail-broken phones is small then why report it? I do know people who have jail-breaked it to get it on another network. Actually the numbers jail-broken are pretty large. When the iPhone was first launched it was not available in Russia for quite some time. Yet within weeks there were members of the Duma walking around with iPhones all jail-broken, same for india and China.

Well, pretty much all the circumstances you describe are either a breach of the user's contract with their service provider or the terms of sale with Apple, so I don't really have much truck with the notion that there's some form of moral imperative on Apple's part to allow it. You're saying Apple should be forced to allow people to breach their contract with Apple or a third party? You could surprise me and find any kind of legal precedent for that al all.

The fact is there are legal and moral available solutions to some of these issues - if you want a network free iPhone, buy it direct from Apple. You get no locking but you also don't get the provider subsidy on the price. Don't like Apples policy on apps? Buy an android phone instead. Hardwares at least as good & you can get apps from anywhere. None of these things are new, they all pre-exist the current iPhone market. Apple are in no moral position to allow you to break the terms of your contract, the legal and moral principle is 'caveat emptor'.

As for taking the phones abroad, I did see a story that it's tricky to buy an iPhone at some Apple stores because they're all being bought up by grey exporters. Who them sell them at utterly massive markups. You're buying an iPhone as a possibly illegal import from someone who is absolutely scalping you on the price and somehow Apple are the immoral party here? What?

I do not want to jail break my iPhone when I get it. I will just have to live with its limitations.

As for tethering that is a network issue. I do not want to have to buy another contract for another device which I might only use three or four times a year. Hence my wanting to tether it to an iPhone for those few occasions. I would be perfectly happy to pay for a daily tethering data bundle, it is just that the networks have 100000+ different contracts but still do not have one that does what I need. As it stands I would need to subscribe to a network contract even if I only needed it a few times a year. That is expensive. If the network offered me a deal that allowed me to pay by the day without having to buy a dongle for £35 and use my existing hardware to tether them. I fully accept that a cap might be needed, None of which would be illegal.

Mine is jailbroken but only for a few utilities that make the phone a little bit better IMO.

I have a utility which stops non-multi tasking capable apps from sitting in the dock. It closes them properly. Another one I have closes all docked apps in one go rather than having to close them down one by one.

I don't have SSH installed so those worms that were doing the rounds did not affect me.