FAQ on the anticipated iPhone software development kit

Erica - It's off topic, but I have no other way to contact you.

I'm working with your doshell.app and unable to create 2 instances of the program regardless of name & info.plist changes.

Any help would be...well...helpful.

thanks,

Greg

Phone SW can certainly bring down a network, but that's not an iPhone-specific issue, and depends ot a large extent on the safeguards the mobile operators & equipment vendors have in place.
A firmware bug in a Motorola handset caused significant portions of the cellular networks in Israel to be shutdown, see
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/17.26.html#subj1

Erica, name me *one phone* from Nokia, SE, Samsung, LG, HTC (and clones), that allowed such easy access to baseband firmware.

This, my dear, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said "malware could bring down the network". Without the sugar coating, he'd say "we had to rush the bejeesus out of the firmware of this thing, else our stock market would plummet. It's already nicknamed The Jesus Phone, so what would you expect? We had to pull a Vista on this one and ship it right away, even though it was still a good 8 months behind being RTM material. So everything runs as root, even though we *did* create a restricted user; we're just not using it because we developed everything as root and not quite tested the memory protection implications and whatnot. So it's plain root and it's locked down to the thinnest hair. Except that, uh, it's rushed, so it evidently has its share of security flaws, which are probably going to be exploited by the hacking crowds. Well, you got the idea, right? So bear with us while we bring ourselves to the security standards set by our competitors, and bring you the real, native, sweet Cocoa-ness to the iPhone in the meantime. As an aside, how about thanking us for making the Web suck a little less as *everyone* made their sites a little more standards-compliant so they'd render properly on the iPhone? Nokia S60v3 phones with Webkit-based browsers got a free ride in the process, have you thought of it?"

Whew. Jobs can really cram a lot of fine lines on such small sentence, doesn't he? :)

FAQ for something that doesn't exist yet? You're jumping the gun again.

As for all the doomsday hack scenarios ...
hackers could do all those DDoS or network attacks today with Windows Mobile phones, Treos, Symbians, etc.

And for doing forged numbers (e.g., SWATing), that doesn't take place in the phone, but upstream, in the exchange, or similar.

Hopefully this will allow MS or someone to develop Exchange/Active Sync support for the iPhone. I got my new iPhone right before going into jury duty, and doing email through Outlook Web Access and Mobile Safari is pretty poor.

For me, it's (almost) the only thing standing between me and phone nirvana.

I don't see why these companies don't make it open for 3rd party in the first place. Being a software developer myself I see it taking far more resources to try to find and squash the exploits ASAP then it would to make an SDK and limit the attempts at hacking the system.

As usual, Gruber [http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/tea_leaf_reading] has a great take on this

apps run as root for now, propably because apple didnt intend to relase an SDK, so they said "its easier for us to make everything root, and since nobody else can make apps for it its safe enough".

best part of this video: "johnny" appleseed using ichat effects
and when he installs leopard: it usually takes about an hour or two, so why don't you get a cup of coffee or go for a walk. AHAHAHHAAH, how about "why don't you get off your ass and do something real."