Those switches are software under the hood though, at least as far as I can tell. I installed freebsd on my purism laptop, and it no longer shuts off the camera/microphone.
> Two hardware kill switches, microphone/camera and wireless/bluetooth
> Now with a physical toggle switch, when your camera and microphone are switched off, you know they are off. Wireless and Bluetooth are combined in a second hardware switch to control all your radio signals inbound and outbound.
That would be a flat out lie if it wasn't actually a hardware switch which is hard to believe for a company whose entire identity and reputation is tied to these exact features.
I do have a video of the wifi in action though: https://tmp.thekyel.com/month/wifi.mp4
I reached out to them a couple of times, and they asked if I had rfkill installed, I told them no, but it shouldn't matter if it was a hardware switch.
They told me that they would look into it, and then never responded after that.
On the other hand, putting a signal onto disable pins is not exactly a kill switch. The description sounds like a hardware switch in front of a soft kill, which would make it some sort of quasi-HKS. A real kill switch would need to totally cut power to that controller rather than rely on it playing nice.
On the gripping hand, I find it hard to believe they would overlook something that crucial. Eg, if it didn't work, it would /have/ to show up during testing.
I wonder if the chip needs to be tightly integrated into the board and a proper HKS would require cutting signal to dozens of those pins -- something that is perhaps impractical -- so they went for a lesser option.
FWIW, there is at least one more person alleging the same broken functionality [2]
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/hard-not-soft-kill-switches/
[2] https://forums.puri.sm/t/wifi-killswitch-didnt-work-when-i-n...
As far as I remember Purism has always claimed that it's hardware switches on the phone, and I don't see why they'd lie because it would be very easy to verify.
I could go check this behavior.
I haven't tried freebsd - could it be freebsd doesn't check for a hotplug?