it’d be you vs every other billionaire

How very Usamerican of you to assume all billionaires were inside of your country :-)

No, it would not be actually dangerous. You just need to be prepared to lose a good part of your money.

After all, it is only a Tricktator. A manipulator and a trickster. No real teeth. No real dictator (though he absolutely wants to become that). No real strength, neither physical nor mental.

Sounds like you have a huge chewing gum in there while talking.

But, if they take away the book, then only a sad face remains…

“Android 15” but this was QPR2 specifically

How can we bring that to a real world (read: cheap Chinese) phone?

Electricity was invented some 7000 years later.

From a software perspective adding a kill switch is needlessly adding a potential vulnerability.

Of course they would test against all imaginable vulnerabilities. It is a weapon after all.

And of course they would make all the needed software tests in a safe environment where the switch doesn’t really destroy things.

need spare parts and software updates

As I said, no direct profit from the kill switch. But the possibility of indirect profit: for every destroyed weapon, you cannot sell spare parts anymore, but then there is the potential to sell a new weapon later.

An ESP32 is a powerful thing, but it is also a microcontroller.

They are programmable as soon as you have physical access. They are NOT like whole PC’s that you can lock up with passwords etc.

More like a gun that you can fire as soon as you have physical access.

I wonder where the expectation has come from? People seem to think that it should be different than it is.

I am very sure that it is true.

Not only such primitve things as a kill switch - because nobody can make any profit directly from deactivating a device - but also lots of dependencies from the manufacturers and from the Usa, for the supply of ammunition, materials, spare parts etc. The same idea that we know as “vendor lock-in” in lots of consumer products.

But could I

He pardoned them because they worked for him. For him personally.

You can’t do that if HE doesn’t want you to do that.

Then you would be dead.

Haven’t they said that about magnetic tape as well?

Some 30 years ago?

Isn’t magnetic tape still around? Isn’t even IBM one of the major vendors?

If you murder a murderer,
then you are a murderer murderer.

A murderer murderer is
still a murderer.

LMAO spam bot

Monte Carlo, during the F1 championchip race, at that one Hotel there with the best view.

statutes that protect […] people trying to cooperate with law enforcement,

I don’t know exactly about France, but such a concept is rare in Europe in general (except England), and even more so when it comes to possession of such materials.

In Germany, I know the tolerance is absolutely ZERO, and the excuses too. You can carry the material to the police to deliver it, and with that you have proven that you were in possession one second before (it is very different with illegal weapons btw.). Private investigators or journalists have tried to do reports about the topic, seriously and neutrally without any doubt, but got punished for possession then.

Always know the basic facts:

The kidnapper is a criminal.

The kidnapper decides his own actions, NOT YOU.

Besides that, in a situation where I could communicate with a kidnapper, I would try to use every single second of it to tell him all kinds of insults, the worst I could imagine.

Modlogs are public

…and hardly ever written.

Violation of human rights.

Oh, wait, maybe they mean USA…

The SD card is broken, but not totally dead yet.

So, decide now if you want to try and rescue some files from it, then DO NOT USE IT anymore until the real data recovery operation starts. No further tries to boot, no fsck etc.