Zittrain

Your article infers the root cause of the death of the Internet is malware NOT appliances like the iPhone, whic have become popular because they are less immune to malware. Did the person who wrote the title even read the article?

The author's premise, that the iPhone is inherently closed, is obsolete with the release of the SDK. That doesn't totally invalidate points made in the book, but it makes it a less interesting read.

Is there anything this organization won't do to smear Apple? Killing the net? I'm pretty sure the 80 - 90% spam traffic, endless streaming of multimedia, an incredibly porous OS in Windows might be a better candidate for the state of the 'Net rather than a phone that has grabbed mindshare for it's unique software and hardware. After reading the article, I couldn't imagine where the headline came from. Innovation? I have clients whose Group Policy is so restrictive, Office barely works. Building better, well-secured, and open standards based software [did Exchange publish an open API I didn't know about?] is how to foster innovation and I'm pretty sure Apple and Linux are at the forefront of that effort.

Talk about killing the 'Net and then having an article span 4 pages so you get 4x the pageviews you'd normally get and increased ad revenue? That is what is killing the net, sites like this.

"The iPhone, for example, seeks out and erases user modifications." This statement boggles the mind - as if the iPhone all by itself hunts down and destroys anything the owner of the phone has modified on the device.

Does Zittrain not understand that the end user has to initiate a firmware update of the iPhone from within iTunes to download and install the latest firmware on the iPhone?

Wonder of wonders, the firmware update erases the old firmware and any corruptions and changes to the OS and built-in apps to return them to a pristine factory-fresh state. iTunes then synchronises all the user’s media, data and settings back onto the nice fresh phone.

Because the SDK has not been released yet and no 3rd party applications are sanctioned as yet, all unofficial modifications and hacks also get erased as these make use of undocumented hacks that are indistinguishable from corruption or malware and exploit security holes in the iPhone to exist. All very straightforward and understandable and not in the least nefarious.

I'm afraid these accusations are an example of sensationalist trolling and manufactured hysteria - not well thought-out, reasoned argument.

Other comments above appropriately point the finger at the true bogeymen that are killing the net - spam, malware and poorly secured software.

Rather than killing the Net, the iPhone is saving it with the huge promise of upcoming third party software, combined with the secure Appstore and sandboxed security model.

-Mart

This same argument could have been made during the era of 128k Mac vs MS/DOS PC vs Commodore 64. Should I be getting a Commodore 64 cell phone?

An innovative phone that actually allows people to use it is doing a lot of "killing"... Hello dillhole...

The new iPhone SDK fits the book's premise: new apps can't be distributed like PC software. Instead they must be approved by Apple and put through the iPhone Apps Store, where Apple takes a cut and reserves the right to filter out or kill apps it doesn't approve.