In addition to to providing your digital music, movies and "print" media, Apple would also like to be the gateway to your home and bank account. Meet the iKey, the invention that lets Steve Jobs mediate your most private spaces.

A new Apple patent, highlighted by the UK's Telegraph newspaper, would provide access to a "a door, car, house or other physical area" via the iPhone through "motion-based input," which could mean, for example, entry of a combination on a virtual combination lock displayed on the iPhone screen. The patent also appears broad enough for use as a virtual wallet, and there's speculation Apple would like to turn the iPhone into precisely that. And so it is that Apple CEO Jobs — the same man who randomly censors content on the iPhone and capriciously lords over the next-generation of computer applications through his "app store" — may yet come to make decisions about whether you are allowed into your own home or bank account. Oh, goody.