Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted an open letter on the Apple Web site explaining that Apple will make a software developer kit available for the iPhone in February 2008. The kit will allow third-party developers to create native applications that will run on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The reason the kit won't be available until February is because Apple wants to be sure that the iPhone is protected from malicious attacks while still being open to third-party development. Jobs claims that creating an SDK that does both will take time.

In other news, HD Moore has publicly posted exploits that take advantage of a vulnerability in Apple's iPhone, the same flaw that's been used by others to unlock the smart phone so it will work on non-AT&T networks. The vulnerability, which is in the TIFF image-rendering library shared by the iPhone's Safari browser and its e-mail program, as well as by the iTunes software, leaves the iPhone wide open to attack, said Moore, who posted a second, and more robust, exploit Tuesday after debuting attack code Monday.