IANAL and things may have changed, but it was my understanding that having a copy protection mechanism, even a simple one, gives them better claim to DMCA protection of their content should someone do something they'd like to discourage. "Your honor they read our source code and stole our private key to break the encryption of our protected data" sounds better than "they downloaded the data we gave them"
I agree calling it a cell phone sets the wrong expectations, but it's still neat and I think a good application could be an elder care pendant (help, fallen, can't get up, yadda yadda) where close promity and custom base station aren't an issue, but never needing to worry about the status of battery would be a big plus.
So this uses vibrations caused by our voice to change the effectiveness of the antenna to absorb power from the base station right? Base station then interprets the varying current draw as amplitude modulated audio and Bob's your uncle? If I'm correct (no sure that I am) wouldn't this require being pretty close to the base station?
That's an interesting point, otherwise I'd say it's basically the Windows equivalent of LD_PRELOAD. Running executables from the "downloads" directory is certainly a thing though, never realized the security implication there (beyond trusting the download natch)
I was briefly concerned before dismissing this all as absurd. Surely we aren't more likely to hold tech companies responsible for the actions of their users than we are to hold gun manufacturers responsible for theirs.
Thanks, came here to say the same thing. This was as surprsing to me as the first time a spammy website started vibrating my phone (dom.vibrator.enabled)