> No doubt if it gets popular the manufacturers will start looking the bootloader though
The bootloader is already "locked" - you have to send a special sequence to unlock it.
As the article says:
> It's not feasible to indelibly burn a static body of code into on-chip ROM.
> The crux is that a firmware loading and update mechanism is virtually mandatory.
So the functionality has to be there - they can't take it away. They could perhaps start changing the sequence required to enable loading mode, but what would be the benefit to them? It wouldn't increase their profits, and they have no reason to care about a few people hacking SD cards to do more than store stuff. Maybe, if the dodgy/oversized cards being sold are negatively affecting a particular brand's reputation, they might insist on their chip producers doing something... *shrug*