Hard, Not Soft, Kill Switches
Ok, maybe I've been doing too much hardware development and more tinkering than the average guy, but this part here, to me, sounds way overblown:<p><pre><code>    > As you can see, it is not a trivial matter to
    > manufacture these HKSes. A lot of research and
    > hard work went into the effort.
</code></pre>
I mean, compared to all the other things one has to get right to design a laptop computer, switching these few signals is indeed very, very trivial.<p>And while the webcam/microphone switches will prevent the particular devices from working, I'm not so sure about the WiFi card and Bluetooth. The microphone surely is dead by cutting the single signal line and the webcam by cutting its power.<p>But there's no guarantee that the W_DISABLE# pins are honored with every firmware of every possible wifi module that could be inserted into that slot. What if W_DISABLE#, on the card, is only a gpio that is checked by the WiFi chip's firmware? It would have been safer to also cut the power there, too. Or at least to verify that W_DISABLE# cuts off power to the RF PAs (transmitter power amplifier) of WiFi and Bluetooth in a way that can't be circumvented.