Just listening to yesterday's Buzz Out Lout (Cnet.com).

Apple have now applied for a patent to remotely brick a jailbroken device.

The patent allows them to find out if the device has been jailbroken, they register the GPS location, registered user, date and time, then it will back-up all of the data on the machine to their servers, use a keyboard scanner to grab usernames and passwords, before taking a photo of the location/the person using the device, and posting it on social networking sites, like Twitter, before bricking the device!

I mean WTF?

Edit:
Patent breakdown

Slashgear article

I can think of someone who could use that as their avatar...

Yet another reason to avoid Apple. [/smug mode]

Yes, because Apple are actually going to go around remotely bricking user's phones. They're THAT stupid they want to throw away the entire mobile market they've built up in a stroke.

My suspicion is this is going to end up in a corporate equivalent of 'find my iphone' for high security applications. With FMI you can 'wipe' an iphone remotely but that I suspect isn't enough for defense companies or those that handle lots of confidential information. They're going to want something a bit more aggressive and permanent i.e. entirely disable the phone and possibly chuck away the device side encryption keys so even pulling out the flash memory isn't going to allow you get anything off it without a mass of CPU time and money.

As always, the nerdiverse focuses on the bit that is massively important to them - 'Oh noes, they're coming after mi jailbroken iPhonez!', rather than looking at the aspect that matters to the 99.something percent of Apple customers who haven't bothered to jailbreak their phones in the first place.

I doubt that that they would actually use this. It could be used for stolen phones, so make them far less attractive as goods that can be traded on. It could also be patented so that no one else can do it.

The corporate tool has always been able to remotely erase the iPhone.

This looks like something new, but I can't see companies being interested in having the fact they've lost an iPhone published on social networking sites...

But this is not just covering remote erase, as a much more secure, and final measure to make sure the thief doesn't get a 'free' iPhone.

Mark

I thought the phone companies had long since been able to brick a phone, when the IMEI number is reported as being stolen?
That solution is fine when phone's merely made calls 'n' texts, but as phones get smarter beyond those 2 abilities, then a more comprehensive answer is going to be required.
Alarming, yes, but in some ways so it the utility of many phones these days.

Yes, but they haven't been able to remotely copy all data from the phone onto their servers, before doing so... And for a corporate, all of the relevant data would already be on their servers anyway.

For a corporate user, the back up held by Apple would be redundant. But for an average non-corporate user (who I imagine are by far and a way the majority of iPhone users) it could be a god send.
Imagine being able to have your replacement phone restored to the moment prior to your losing it, remotely, if you'd been between syncs at home for instance.
I'd be saying 'Thank you very much'.
I don't know if that's the intention behind it, but it'd be one hell of a selling point.

I'll go for my daily backup on my own computer. I just don't feel comfortable with them being able to remotely upload all my data and junk my 'phone, just because it was jailbroken or I stuck a different SIM in it, without my permission. I hope they will be paying for the extra data charges!

Not sure how long it would take to upload 32GB at GPRS speeds (we get 5GB at full speed, after that, it drops to GPRS speed)...