CALIFORNIA: It’s official! Apple does have the capability to remotely manage applications on your iPhone. In an interview to Walls Street Journal, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs admitted to iPhones having a mechanism that allows the device to contact Apple website and delete the software that the company deems harmful.

Jobs told the newspaper, "Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull." Popularly branded `kill switch', it can disable potentially malicious applications that have been downloaded to any iPhone.

The interview confirms the recent claim of independent researcher Jonathan Zdziarski, who discovered a file in the iPhone's firmware that links to an Apple XML page containing a blank "black list" for malicious applications.

However, it is not clear that the Core Location blacklist found by Zdziarski is the "lever" that Jobs refered to. According to analysts, there could also be a separate mechanism elsewhere in the iPhone's software. It is also yet not clear that what is Apple's exact definition of "malicious" software