Now seeing the whole context, i feel incredibly betrayed - This was not a backdoor, but behavior documented in the datasheet. I didn't realize this 3 years ago! If this was academics, Domas' work would be plagiarism, with the 2004 datasheet being unquoted prior work: http://datasheets.chipdb.org/VIA/Nehemiah/VIA%20C3%20Nehemia... (Page A-10 in the appendices)