I don't think it's that nobody _likes_ the idea, I think the problem is that very few people really care. You see this in products everywhere. Rough edges sacrificing the user experience which could be technically solved but are punted in favor of More Important Things.
What happened to this feature? If Bezos wanted this it would be there.
I don't know why it was axed, but my best guess is that it aesthetically looked pretty bad, and it was probably a pain to produce at high yields. Also, I can imagine users finding it more confusing than an obvious well-labelled button.
How so?
i assume you're referring to the West/EU/USA here. i share your skepticism, especially around the EU's own GDPR. "government agencies and law enforcement", as well as "activities under the scope of Chapter 2, Title V of the Treaty on European Union" are exempted from GDPR.
The GDPR isn't very topical here, because big conglomerates have been violating it since it's inception. Until the teeth have been enforced, we have to assume that a US company is not only shovelling all of your data to every government agency (which would happen even with the GDPR being followed, as you say) that blinks at them a few times but is also selling it to every marketing agency that is capable of paying.
Maybe the Echo team said it was too hard, and Bezos had to "disagree and commit".
-- Bezos in his 1997 letter to shareholders
The problem I see with this - other than being cool - that it requires motion, so more likely to fail with time.
I'm so sick of reading daily the scummy tactics these tech giants are using to hoover up private/personal data, and then reading their little acolytes on HN defending them ("Oh, it's probably just an A/B test, nothing to worry about!" or "It's too hard to monitor what our company is doing, even when presented to hard facts on the daily, what's a dev to do!").
> Two hardware kill switches, microphone/camera and wireless/bluetooth
> Now with a physical toggle switch, when your camera and microphone are switched off, you know they are off. Wireless and Bluetooth are combined in a second hardware switch to control all your radio signals inbound and outbound.
That would be a flat out lie if it wasn't actually a hardware switch which is hard to believe for a company whose entire identity and reputation is tied to these exact features.
I do have a video of the wifi in action though: https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/wifi.mp4
I reached out to them a couple of times, and they asked if I had rfkill installed, I told them no, but it shouldn't matter if it was a hardware switch.
They told me that they would look into it, and then never responded after that.
On the other hand, putting a signal onto disable pins is not exactly a kill switch. The description sounds like a hardware switch in front of a soft kill, which would make it some sort of quasi-HKS. A real kill switch would need to totally cut power to that controller rather than rely on it playing nice.
On the gripping hand, I find it hard to believe they would overlook something that crucial. Eg, if it didn't work, it would /have/ to show up during testing.
I wonder if the chip needs to be tightly integrated into the board and a proper HKS would require cutting signal to dozens of those pins -- something that is perhaps impractical -- so they went for a lesser option.
FWIW, there is at least one more person alleging the same broken functionality [2]
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/hard-not-soft-kill-switches/
[2] https://forums.puri.sm/t/wifi-killswitch-didnt-work-when-i-n...
As far as I remember Purism has always claimed that it's hardware switches on the phone, and I don't see why they'd lie because it would be very easy to verify.
I could go check this behavior.
I haven't tried freebsd - could it be freebsd doesn't check for a hotplug?
On the down side switches are expensive and can fail though so they add warranty cost and another 'hole' in the case.
That said, a phone case that covers up all of those bits until you expressly open access to them would probably sell well.
We already have good enough technology that a phone should last us 10 years at least without having issues with the performance. The only problem is having replaceable batteries.
We need to move back towards things that last and backwards compatibility. Then it would make sense to pay $1000 or even $2000 on a phone, since you know it works perfectly and it'll last you 10-20 years.
Uh, no they aren't.
In addition, since switches are an electromechanical component, they also affect your mechanical case engineering which electronic components don't do.
Finally, if your device is "water resistant" or somesuch, you now have an even bigger engineering headache waiting for your design team. Especially since you don't want a pushbutton, you probably want a slide switch.
Switches and buttons are really expensive on electronics components from a relative cost and engineering cost standpoint.
The easy way to ensure that a switch is waterproof is to use something like a magnetic reed switch or hall effect sensor, so the switch just moves a magnet, which is sensed thorugh the plastic case. It uses more real estate than a pure switch, but requires no open holes through the case.
This is at odds with the (apparent) consumer preference of smaller everything.
Um, using a hall effect sensor is exactly the kind of "soft switch" we're trying to avoid, no?
And magnetic reed switches are big, very expensive, vibration sensitive and failure prone. Since this is security, you're going to want it to fail open and you're not going to want a switch that closes briefly if you vibrate the phone.
Mechanical engineering is hard. Let's go shopping! ;)
Reed switches are available that are a few mm long, they aren't exactly huge.
You know what? I think I'd like your physical kill so much better. It could cleaner to implement, too. If the manufacturer couldn't offer it, I'd be happy to do business with a modder who could.
An existing exterior button like the iPhone's ring/silent switch seems like an ideal starting point to work a third-party hardware solution around. But given what little free space exists inside these devices, here's hoping that solution is more wiring than components!