[Edward Kirk]

Mr. Zdziarski's discovery of a remote blacklist that gives Apple the ability to zap apps from your phone remotely was pretty concerning for us jailbreakers and NetShare owners, and even though Steve said it's only for zapping the malicious/dangerous ones to keep us secure, it's still a little frightening (though understandable I suppose) that it was kept a secret. For those who don't like the idea of Apple periodically checking out their iPhone, Mr. Zdziarski has posted a way to disable the feature.

Just so we're clear right off the bat, we have no reason as of yet to think that there is any real need for disabling the blacklist checker at this time, as we (currently) trust Steve's statement that it will only be used on security risks, but if you still want it gone then continue. Just remember that we haven't tried it and we don't take responsibility for any problems that this could cause down the road.

To disable the "kill switch", jailbreak your device if it hasn't been jailbroken already, and add the following into the location /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 iphone-services.apple.com

Supposedly that will work. If you try it and you can tell if it worked one way or another, let us know in the comments.

[via iPhone Atlas]

[Stephen007]

Without having tried it myself I can add that this should work just fine. All you're doing is telling the phone what the IP address is for iphone-services.apple.com. Most of the time when you visit a website by name it will rely on looking up the DNS records from your ISP/provider each time. This is simply skipping that part since the phone/computer/whatever checks the hosts file first.

I use the hosts file occassionally just to block ads from some of the hacker websites out there (astalavista anyone?). Throw the domain that you want to block in there with 127.0.0.1 and voila... bye bye ads from that domain.

For those who don't know 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address, so you're basically telling the phone that it can find apple's website on your phone. This is, of course, completely not true but results in it NOT being able to get to that site, which is the objective.

[outaru]

very informative stephen.. thanks..

[warlock]

I have many apps that have been removed from the App store (i.e. NetShare, PhoneSaber, etc) and they are still on my home screen!