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The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

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Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#761

Post by forapurpose »

jeffrallen wrote: post #656
chris72205 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had never heard of this...but now I can only imagine how exciting this must have been as one of the engineers-- working on a top secret project for the CIA in an abandoned bowling alley: https://electricalstrategies.com/about/in-the-news/spies-in-... edit: whoops, looks like amatecha beat me to posting more info

Exciting, but not so ethical. We owe society to put our knowledge towards making it better for all people, not just "our team".

> Exciting, but not so ethical. We owe society to put our knowledge towards making it better for all people, not just "our team".

Our team promoted liberty and democracy worldwide (see below). The other promoted totalitarian dictatorship, labor camps, etc. If your team is liberty and democracy - self-determination for all - then it's not 'our team', it's everyone's team.

To address the elephant: Yes, there were many, many exceptions to the West's support of democracy, and many of them were awful (Indonesia, the Mideast, Zaire/Congo, and many others come to mind) but beyond a doubt, during the Cold War and after democracy and liberty exploded - stop and compare it to any other time in human history. Lots of bad things happened, but compare that with Soviet-dominated areas such as the USSR itself and Eastern Europe.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#762

Post by forapurpose »

51lver wrote: post #738
brokenmachine wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If our team is resorting to unethical and immoral ways to gain that advantage, then we can't take the moral high ground and also can't complain when the other team also does "whatever it takes" to gain an advantage. Also, security through obscurity is, as we know, an illusion. Information always finds a way out. I understand your point, but there should be limits.

As I tell my small human, The good guy must do only good, or he is also the bad guy.

What do you tell your small human about the current behavior of many prominent adults, or if the small one is too young to see what's happening, what will you tell them?

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#767

Post by jrnichols »

late2part wrote: post #758
jrnichols wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor is there any advantage for them to publish false information. of course there is. It's called ad revenue and page views, both of which they're raking in today with these allegations. This story is all over the place. I don't trust Bloomberg with anything Apple at all and haven't for years now.

Here is one motivation for false information. Financial gain. Someone could have made a lot of money with put options.

Yes, this too. Some of the Bloomberg and WSJ "leaks" feel like their primary motive has been subtle stock manipulation. In particular, the "demand is slowing for $PRODUCT" articles that we continue to see.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#768

Post by whatpad »

wepple wrote: post #239
simias wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the parent was talking about this specific type of attacks but other types of hardware backdoors. I think the answer to that is very obviously yes, and given what we know about intelligence agencies I'm even willing to go as far as saying that it is likely (or at least, if you have reasons to be worried about Uncle Sam getting to your stuff you should consider it a very real possibility). Modern ASICs a…

> Modern ASICs are so complex that I'm sure that sneaking a tiny backdoor into the behemoth that's a modern CPU or embedded SoC would be almost trivial. I suspect putting in a backdoor would be difficult because they are complex. Wouldn’t it be far too easy for the backdoor to inadvertently cause reliability or performance issues? And the bug would have to be useful enough to warrant potentially destroying the semico…

Nobody cares about your wild, uneducated speculation.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#769

Post by craftyguy »

erichocean wrote: post #737
craftyguy wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't patch it. Sure you can. OEMs regularly release patches for platform BMCs.

Not sure about you, but I'm not an "OEM".

Well, you cannot patch the vast majority of the software in your computer (assuming you are like the vast majority of users using proprietary crap for everything). That does not mean it is all unpatchable. If supermicro care, they could release a BMC update, for example.

Re: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

#770

Post by doubt_me »

taysic wrote: post #766
brynjolf wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the answer to that. Russian bots target Hacker news as well as other sites.

Any evidence of that?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-charges-russian-gru-office...

Have fun googling what the rest of the GRU does

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