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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Except the US has killswitches hard wired in. A fusible link, irreversibly bricking it based on signal from the mother ship.
Either you're talking confidently about something you couldn't possibly know, or you're risking the rest of your life in prison for leaking top-secret military info. Which is it?
Where is the support for this? I believe they would but as I understand it they cut cloud services, not core functionality.
It is a long standing rumour. Not just in these in a lot of their gear. I believe it.
It's also rumoured, going way back over 20 years, that the us has kill switches in a majority of the world's computers.
I remember working with an old dude 10 years ago who pointed at the CPU in a computer and said "the government can turn that off whenever they want". He died of COVID so take his quote with what value you want.
I lean towards discounting both rumors. I think the temptation to use said kill-switches would prove too great to resist, particularly for the authoritarian types involved.
We saw this a lot with provisions of the "PATRIOT Act". It was championed as tools needed to combat terrorists and claimed to be reserved for such cases. In actuality, it was used to go after people running fan sites for sci-fi tv shows, among other things.
If such a kill switch existed in computer hardware, I'm sure it would have been used already. I'm less sure about a kill switch in the planes. On one hand, that's a pretty situational tool, and you wouldn't want to play that card until you really needed it.
OTOH, we didn't hear about threats to throw the kill switch during the bluster over Greenland. If they had one, I think it would have been part of that bluster.
Wow if its rumoured it must be true
Meh, they are whores but they dont produce shit. They get your information through invasive NSA actions and capitalist acumbaggery.
Intel management engine strikes again
Yes, but it can be wired-out
The way I heard it, it's like hard wired it is thought, not like a part of the software per se, something physical in there they can trigger with a message that makes a circuit that bricks the unit.
We don't actually know though, I bet if someone did find out lockheed would have their head and the news wouldn't touch it.