You might be right but I think we cannot assume malice when it could be laziness. It might be that the exact same board has multiple target audiences and they just rebrand it for different purposes with different pricing.

That said, the microphone is so weirdly positioned that it gets suspicious indeed.

> I think we cannot assume malice when it could be laziness

Why can't it be both?

Perception of laziness with an option for later maliciousness and somewhat plausible deniability.

> I think we cannot assume malice when it could be laziness

If you are too lazy to go back and check if you left the gas on, you bear responsibility if the place explodes.

At the very least, it's negligent to leave something like that in and not be very upfront about it.

>That said, the microphone is so weirdly positioned that it gets suspicious indeed.

How is it weirdly positioned? To me it seems there is rather few options for such small board.

Microphones and LEDs have been used famously for side channel attacks and also to circumvent air gaps. From a Least Power point of view this is troubling.

And rather than "the Chinese", how about "anyone robo-dialling some SSH connections"?