MacOSG: How to turn off the iPhone/iPod touch’s ‘kill-switch’

Posted by Daniel East Apple ico Aug 16, 2008 at 4:43pm

imageRecently it was discovered that Apple has a “kill-switch” built in the iPhone OS 2.x software in which the iPhone can phone home, check for unauthorized applications, and disable them. If you are willing to jailbreak your iPhone, there is a way to turn this kill-switch off.

Security expert Jonathan Zdziarski has posted a way for blocking Apple’s kill-switch. After you have jailbroken your iPhone you need to edit your ‘/etc/hosts’ file and insert the following line:

127.0.0.1 iphone-services.apple.com

This will tell your iPhone not to bother looking up ‘iphone-services.apple.com’ via DNS and go straight to ‘127.0.0.1’ which is always the IP address for ‘localhost’ (the iPhone).

Accessing /etc/hosts via SSH using Transmit

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Daniel East

Daniel M. East is a technology author, freelance writer, presenter/trainer and consultant with more than 20 years experience in professional photography, design, pro-audio and music industry marketing. East is also founder and president of The Apple Groups Team support network for user groups.

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