Yeah. I was desperately trying to be charitable, but I suspect you're correct and this is the motivating reason.
> My sci-fi brain is imaging motors with wacky windings that need specially PWM'ed streams of electricity to spin effectively, etc...
After having recently read too many military sci-fi novels in short succession[0], I started to think how warring alien species would secure their military hardware against reverse engineering. I came to a similar conclusion - there would likely be a whole field of making every possible bit of a device coupled with every other bit, kind of like homomorphic encryption, but done with atoms and fields instead of bits. Like you said - windings that only work if you PWM the voltage precisely, perhaps according to some algorithm that compensates for those windings being scrambled, softly shorted, and otherwise smeared across half of the device's interior surface. Etc. Impossible to fix, but also impossible to figure out without original schematics.
And yes, the way the market is heading, I suspect we'll start doing this to ourselves to secure sales and protect IP.
> My sci-fi brain is imaging motors with wacky windings that need specially PWM'ed streams of electricity to spin effectively, etc...
After having recently read too many military sci-fi novels in short succession[0], I started to think how warring alien species would secure their military hardware against reverse engineering. I came to a similar conclusion - there would likely be a whole field of making every possible bit of a device coupled with every other bit, kind of like homomorphic encryption, but done with atoms and fields instead of bits. Like you said - windings that only work if you PWM the voltage precisely, perhaps according to some algorithm that compensates for those windings being scrambled, softly shorted, and otherwise smeared across half of the device's interior surface. Etc. Impossible to fix, but also impossible to figure out without original schematics.
And yes, the way the market is heading, I suspect we'll start doing this to ourselves to secure sales and protect IP.
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[0] - The Expeditionary Force book series.