The following breaks my heart, as I love the ThinkPad keyboard, but it's just not worth it.<p>If your work is sensitive in any way, this is what you can expect from Lenovo:<p>> In February 2021, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that U.S. investigators found in 2008 that military units in Iraq were using Lenovo laptops in which the hardware had been altered. According to a testimony from the case in 2010, "A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the U.S. military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China." [0]<p>How is this company still allowed to do business in the USA? There are ThinkPads in the most important of places. Not just in government, but in research...<p>There are apparently no adults in the room, so make your own decisions.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_incidents" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...</a>
It warms my heart to see people still taking about the X201’s faulty WiFi switch. I loved that laptop but ended up mothballing it over the switch. It remains a perfect example of how cheaping out on an extremely minor component (a plastic slide-switch) can sabotage an otherwise fantastic product.
a larger hardware fix for the x200/x201 is the x2100 upgrade (intel comet lake motherboard, nvme, up to 64gb ddr4, 13" 3000x2000 ips panel).<p>see <a href="https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xyte.ch/mods/x210-x2100/</a> for an overview, although sadly the availability is diminishing (and the hardware is far from bleeding edge four years later) -- the above linked vendor is awol.<p>i've got myself 2.5 x2100s, hoping that will tide me over until something new becomes available.
Wait so the kill switch is really just a suggestion that is then handled in the card”s firmware?<p>I guess that’s how things like cameras status led is compromised?
It's possible that thinner kapton tape would be easier to cut into a narrow sliver and place over a pin, while having the card still fit in the socket without being too thick?
There are issues with trusting a pci attached wifi device running a pile of closed firmware anyways.<p>If you're concerned about this type of thing discard the internal wifi card and use an usb-attached wifi dongle you can unplug to achieve a "wifi physically disconnected" state with certainty.<p>The other advantage is whatever firmware's running on the wifi dongle isn't going to be potentially accessing host memory over usb, which a pci bus master could theoretically do.
My experience with ACPI is limited to tinkering with it a bit for installing macOS on unsupported systems, but shouldn't it be possible to avoid any physical modification and do the same with an SSDT that disables the power to the kill switch?
isn't there a simpler way to bypass the hardware switch ...like shorting the switch terminals on the inside to permanently leave it "on"?