http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/appl...ded_advertising
Steve Jobs has submitted one of the most devious patents of all time: operating system advertising. That’s right, according to the patent, Jobs wants you looking at ads embedded right into your operating system.
To take it one-step further, the patent attorneys who filed the application did their due diligence making sure every aspect and use of the "innovation" was outlined in detail. This passage sheds a little light on just how invasive and annoying this could be:
“The operating system is configured to present one or more of the advertisements to users of the computer device. In some implementations, the operating system can disable one or more functions during the presentation of the advertisements and then enable the function(s) in response to the advertisements ending. That is, the operating system can disable some aspect of its operation to prompt the operator to pay attention to the advertisement.”
Not only are they going to put ads in front of your face, they are going to do everything in their power to make you pay attention to them. This basically says they would go as far as crippling the device while the ad is displaying. Further, in the application they talk about measures to verify user presence, such as user confirmations throughout the ad.
The application makes careful notation not to distinguish its platform so that this technology could be used on any device, i.e. “portable and desktop computers, servers, electronics, media players, game devices, mobile phones, wireless devices, email devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), embedded devices, televisions, set top boxes, etc” per the filing.