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iPhone hacker reveals Apple’s online (iTunes) rental plans

Categories: Apple, iPhone, Rumors,
By: , IntoMobile
Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 6:50 PM

Apple planning rental storeThe latest iPhone update didn’t really do anything impressive for our iPhones. Sure, that TIFF-image security hole was patched, but it was more of a headache for third-party iPhone developers than anything else. Or was it? One iPhone hacker noticed that the last iPhone update contained some interesting code hidden within. These code strings seem to indicate (and confirm previous rumors) that Apple is cooking up some sort of online-based (most likely iTunes-based) rental scheme.

Here’s the code-of-interest from the “lockdownd” file:

pumpkin:~ pumpkin$ strings /usr/local/share/iphone-filesystem/usr/libexec/lockdownd | grep -i rental
trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not retrieve FairPlayID
trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not initialize FairPlay context
trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not verify the rental bag response: %d
load_rental_bag_request: Could not retrieve FairPlayID
load_rental_bag_request: Could not initialize FairPlay context
load_rental_bag_request: Could not generate rental bag request
load_rental_bag_request: Could not create mutable dictionary
load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFData from request message
load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFArray
load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFNumber from indice
RentalBagResponse
RentalBagRequest
pumpkin:~ pumpkin$

Is Apple planning on launching a movie-rental section for the iTunes Store? We’d pay maybe a buck, or two, to rent a movie for our iPhones, and slightly more for a full-fledged (higher-resolution) version. Anything more expensive than that, and you can bet we’ll be keeping our online movie rental subscription. Act

[Via: World of Apple]

About The Author

Will Park

Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...