Who is naive enough to think this was only a mistake that was left there without fixing?
In order to remain objective, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed no malice (I'm pretty sure gentlemand is quoting me from my responses on reddit).
Looks like an obvious kill-switch to me. Why did no one see this yet? Isn't firmware code open source? Im not sure how this works, so im going to need more data. But to me this sounds like a way for Jihan to be able to kill BTC at any given time. How the fuck we managed to not notice this earlier? this is a disaster. Imagine if Jihan got paid by PBOC trillions to brick all the ASICs at once...
The firmware is fairly difficult to read. The code paths involved here are quite odd and not really intuitive, although once you know what you are looking for, it is fairly obvious. The phone home code was well known beforehand as that is fairly obvious, but that it can cause a remote stopping of mining was unknown.