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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

#231
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just for clarity, there are some cases where the CEO is in fact left out of the loop specifically so they aren't in jeopardy of lying to shareholders. But typically it is the chief counsel who is informed in these scenarios. It is significant the Apple statements have been clear to rule out that possibility.

[deleted]

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

#232

I really have little doubt that the Chinese are integrating their spy chips into computer hardware going to the big four or even the pentagon. It's probably how they stole the designs to the f-35[you know that plane that costs over a trillion dollars to develop]. It would catastrophic if apple knew or even acknowledges the possibility of the Chinese having a backdoor into their servers and would result in massive shi…

I find it extremely hard to believe that China is inserting magic backdoor chips into all of our computer hardware. What's much more likely is that they were able to bribe or threaten some engineers into giving information away. That's been a common tactic since spying became a thing.

This[0] is a backdoor that was discovered _only_ through reading patents on the chip. It gave the highest possible privilege(ring -4) to the user by simply running an undocumented cpu register. It would be incredibly easy to hide something like this within one of the 100 of thousands of computers that go to the big 4 or even the pentagon.

I'd imagine people at the pentagon select randomly from a number of computers coming in and do some chip analysis like this[1] but I can only speculate and they probably can't stop all the hardware backdoors this way.

Anybody that would be caught disclosing highly classified information would probably be found and promptly hanged(or get in some sort of freak car accident). They probably have some serious counterintelligence to catch the leaks. Once again I am only speculating.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSAF_qT_FY [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4aF-qiziM

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old one was in place at the time of these alleged events and has publicly denied it as well.[1] [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2018/10/05/sewell-says-fbi-never-h...

Is he under the same burden to tell the truth, legally speaking, as the current chief counsel?

Probably ethical violation to lie (lawyers)

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

#235
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also that one time they published 16 anti-Sanders articles in 16 hours, probably because his ideas would reduce Amazon’s profits. [0] [0] https://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/11/headlines/washington_...

A news website publishes many articles about hot topics. Is 16 a lot or a littler? Is that more or less than pro-Sanders or anti/pro-Clinton articles? DemocracyNow had nothing to say about that. Even though a complaint whose only evidence is one hand-assembled image shouldn't be taken seriously as an evidence-backed analysis, here goes: WaPo's response to that cherry-picking accusation (which included some strange ch…

Thank you for the extra context. The reality is much less harsh than the article would have me believe.

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

#236

The interesting thing about this story is that everyone is hopping up and down trying to figure out if it's true, but the one thing everybody agrees with is that the attack is practical. Whether it happened in this specific case or not, what are we doing to prevent it from happening in general?

This is a great point.

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

#237
post #9

Man, I am now 90% convinced that someone intentionally misled Bloomberg. It looks like this may end up being an extremely embarrassing episode for them.

embarrassing, or will they just ignore it and never publish a retraction? I have the feeling they'll just ignore it. Like they have with all of the other totally false Apple stories.

Bloomberg is unreliable when it comes to Apple.

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

#238
post #230

The interesting thing about this story is that everyone is hopping up and down trying to figure out if it's true, but the one thing everybody agrees with is that the attack is practical. Whether it happened in this specific case or not, what are we doing to prevent it from happening in general?

I was under the impression they all agree it's theiretically possible but wildly impractical to pull off.

The wildly impractical parts are some of the specific details, e.g. the logistics of getting a specific board to a specific customer without involving enough people that it creates a high risk of getting caught.

But if you just backdoored a random 10,000 boards out of ten million and let them go to 10,000 random customers, you would get internal access to thousands of random companies, and at least some of them would be interesting.

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

#239

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…

Smart money is always on the news media being #fakenews.

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

#240

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…

After spending the last 10 months day trading, my gut tells me that it's probably the later case, where Bloomberg is doubling down, their journalistic verification processes would seem to be next to nothing at this point... not only Bloomberg, but many other "news" outlets.

I'm saying this because I've noticed quite a few 'hit' pieces, coming out of these "news" agencies that seem to have no other agenda than affecting the price of publicly traded stock in these companies.

One moment "this or that" is the worst possible thing that could happen to company A, and the next moment, it's just not as bad as everyone would have you believe... it's like they themselves want to push the stock price down so they can buy cheap shares, and then pump the price back up again so they can sell at a profit... strangest news cycles I've ever seen on this stuff... and it happens repeatedly all the time... analyst A at Financial Institution B "downgrades" stock X, and then sometime later comes a complete reversal...

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