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Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

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Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#131

Post by Barrin92 »

tunesmith wrote: post #63

Is it precedented for a news organization to double down like this in the case where a reporter just makes stuff up Stephen Glass style? Because barring a Stephen Glass scenario, what's fascinating here is that no matter which side is right, this is evidence of some sort of mysterious power play. Either Apple was hacked, they know, and are denying, which is evidence of them being under the thumb of U.S. national secu…

You don't need to resort to spooky forces to imagine why Apple wants to deny an attack on their security. It damages the value of the company, especially in a time when they try to market themselves as security conscious.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#132

Post by appleiigs »

mcphage wrote: post #108
parliament32 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tim Cook is not properly informed - which is very unlikely at this point Humor me, why is this unlikely? Why is it not possible that (whatever three letter agency) grabbed a few engineers, told them to do X without talking to anyone else, at the risk of them and their families getting disappeared to a black site? Besides, in security controlled jobs it's perfectly normal to not be allowed to disclose what you're wor…

> This idea that Tim Cook / Apple PR must know everything that's going on at Apple is kinda ridiculous. He doesn't have to know everything, but he sure as hell would know "a foreign government is implanting spy chips into the hardware that is being sold to us".

A foreign spy agency isn't going to walk around with a sign saying, hey we planted this. The spy's sole purpose is to make sure Tim doesn't know about it.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#133

Post by aero142 »

avip wrote: post #88
aero142 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all just speculation but this seems like the exact kind of story you would want in order to pass some legislation to prevent foreign manufactured chips being used by USG.

It's also "the exact kind of story you would want" in order to: - PR a HW verification firm. - manipulate a stock - and many more

The reason I'm wildly speculating in this particular direction is that Bloomberg is claiming lots of unspecified high level government employees are their source.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#134

Post by dmschulman »

jessaustin wrote: post #125
IBM wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What they denied was that the servers were used in production. They also said they didn't find the firmware on the server as shipped from Supermicro, it was downloaded from their website [1]. >Update: A source familiar with the case at Apple told Ars that the compromised firmware affected servers in Apple's design lab, and not active Siri servers. The firmware, according to the source, was downloaded directly from Su…

That is neither a confirmation nor a denial, although it is obnoxious. Who is this guy, Chairman of the Fed? A simple "I can't comment on ongoing investigations" would have sufficed. Instead, he's warning Congress about their reading habits? It sounds like something JEH would have said...

Christopher Wray is the Director of the FBI

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#135

Post by moftz »

tunesmith wrote: post #63

Is it precedented for a news organization to double down like this in the case where a reporter just makes stuff up Stephen Glass style? Because barring a Stephen Glass scenario, what's fascinating here is that no matter which side is right, this is evidence of some sort of mysterious power play. Either Apple was hacked, they know, and are denying, which is evidence of them being under the thumb of U.S. national secu…

Tim Cook would have to know. If there is something like a NSL involved, Apple's legal team would have already reviewed it. That same legal team would also be advising Cook on what he publicly says since he is an officer in the company. He could lose his job or be fined for saying false information in the press (think about what happened to Musk) so its in his and his legal team's best interest to only say true things in the press or at least spin things so they aren't blatantly false. An NSL compels you to say nothing. You can neither confirm nor deny anything and its probably against the law for him to outright lie about the situation in the eyes of the SEC so he has to either be spinning things, omitting things, or outright telling the truth. The Bloomberg piece is fantastic but that kind of attack vector does exist however narrow it may be. I don't know why Bloomberg seems to want to double down on this. They are either incredibly stupid and are involved in some murder-suicide plot against Supermicro or they are telling the truth but maybe a little misguided.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#136

Post by dustingetz »

tunesmith wrote: post #63

Is it precedented for a news organization to double down like this in the case where a reporter just makes stuff up Stephen Glass style? Because barring a Stephen Glass scenario, what's fascinating here is that no matter which side is right, this is evidence of some sort of mysterious power play. Either Apple was hacked, they know, and are denying, which is evidence of them being under the thumb of U.S. national secu…

It could simply be classified

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#137

Post by appleiigs »

fhood wrote: post #25
parliament32 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Tim Cook is not properly informed - which is very unlikely at this point Humor me, why is this unlikely? Why is it not possible that (whatever three letter agency) grabbed a few engineers, told them to do X without talking to anyone else, at the risk of them and their families getting disappeared to a black site? Besides, in security controlled jobs it's perfectly normal to not be allowed to disclose what you're wor…

Because Cook would have known about the results of the security audits that were performed.

Accounting has audits too and there is still accounting fraud, mis-statements, theft.

We're commenting on Hacker News and we're believing that Tim is all knowing because of a security audit... against some malicious actor with the resources of a foreign state??

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#138

Post by olyjohn »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #110
MertsA wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg listed a lot of entities in that article and every single one that wasn't anonymous has all but called Bloomberg outright frauds over it. They have all sorts of anonymous sources telling them anything and everything about this supposed plot yet none of them provided any shred of evidence to back up their claims. Where's the smoking gun here? Why don't we have die shots of this thing? Why hasn't anyone on th…

What do you expect Bloomberg to do? Give up their sources? I'm sure they will have no trouble getting new stories if they did that, right? Given the size of the story and their commitment to it I would bet they were duped. There are many who would like to see them lose credibility, who would like to further escalate trade war with China, or who simply shorted some stocks... Or all of the above. But that's a bet, not…

Here's what I expect them to do. Show me a real picture of the chip. Show me some samples of the malicious traffic. Show me some code that they found, tell us which server models they found the affected hardware in. Somebody should have SOME shred of information on this, but there is none. You don't just sell thousands of servers, and not have a few of them that end up getting shipped to someone else, or have a few that end up in someone's test lab, or home lab.

Somebody should be able to produce SOMETHING without giving up their sources. Why can't they produce any of this?

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook Calling for Bloomberg to Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story

#140

Post by goshx »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #37
goshx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have become a disappointment for me. A lot of misleading articles, paid promotional content, and so on. Now this one... I have blocked them completely from my social media and news sources.

Oh, so you know what the truth is in this case? Good for you! /s

I do not and I never stated I do. What I am saying is that I already had many reasons to stop trusting them and now they have another dubious article out there. I don't have the time nor the patience to investigate each of their articles and it's not like they are the only source of news out there. I've had enough with them already and that's the whole point of my comment.
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