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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

#321

Post by jsoc815 »

jsoc815 wrote: post #103
xGrill wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goes directly to FBI without telling boss at Apple. This is really hard to believe. An engineer who found this bug at Apple would most likely be praised for finding it. It is a huge discovery. What motivation would he have to not tell his manager?

> would most likely be praised for finding it. It is a huge discovery. Seriously, history, recent and otherwise, is littered w/the ghosts and carcasses of employees who were anything but rewarded for identifying problems great and small. Oftentimes the safest thing to do is to pretend that one saw/heard/knows nothing while hoping that someone else has the steel to sound the alarm. And for this sort of situation, ther…

Hmm... flags and more down-votes, but still no counterarguments or questions. (Dang, what's up with that?)

Anyway, here's a September article from Axios entitled, "The Trump administration's secret anti-China plans" https://www.axios.com/trump-administration-anti-china-campai...

From the article: "The broadside against China — which is planned to be both rhetorical and substantive — will be "administration-wide,"" [emphasis added] ""The push is coming from the national security apparatus," the source added."

Personally, I hope no products are compromised, ever. That's probably not the case, and either way, the average person won't care much in the short term. Busy w/other stuff, they probably don't remember this story today, if they even heard about it. Businessweek is, after all, a business magazine targeted at a pretty specific audience.

As for whether Bloomberg's story is part of a wider campaign, I don't know and don't believe I've said otherwise. It doesn't really matter to me, as I know that a game is on and that it isn't unreasonable to use such a story while playing. I've seen and heard all sorts of curious things in the last few years. Nothing about today's environment tells me that I'll have fewer such occurrences.

Toodles, kids.

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

#322

Post by crankylinuxuser »

x220 wrote: post #290
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long story short, this is really wanting me to obtain the gerbers for the motherboards I use, and verify the parts on the board are the parts listed. This the basis of open source hardware. The next step is to obtain firmware for each chip, and compile and load it on all programmable chips. Again, but open source firmware. Then moving up, we need an open source OS, which we have. The last area is having open source s…

>Although, FPGAs could supplant some hardware. But wouldn't you want the FPGAs to be open source, too?

Oh, indeed! What I'm saying is that if hardware was FPGA, we could reprogram with recompiled/resysnthesized FPGA code and upload with better-trusted code (think of binary reproducibility).

We still have to deal with 'trusting the compiler(synthesizer)' but with iceStorm, we're a good way there. It's still ugly around the edges, but I think this is one of the better ways forward in creating a fully supported FPGA platform (thinking the difference in microprocessor dev prior and after GCC inclusion of Atmels).

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

#323

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

panda888888 wrote: post #319
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about trust (at least for me). It's about the credibility of the account. "Journalists got something wrong" is a lot easier for me to believe than "there is a massive conspiracy to cover something up and there just so happens to be no evidence of it besides our say so."

Hmm. The involvement of Elemental is enough evidence for me. A then 200-person startup with maybe 10 hardware engineers and lots of government clients would be a great target. It makes me thing the hack was real. Why else would Bloomberg have even bothered to report about Elemental?

So, are you saying that if a big journalism outlet wants to convince you that a world-shaking hack has occurred, all they have to do is name a plausible target? Interesting. My standards of evidence are higher.

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

#324

Post by makomk »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #232
jschwartzi wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

The existence of the Via C3 "backdoor" was actually documented in the official datasheet, along with the correct MSR bit to enable/disable it. See page A-10 in appendix A: http://datasheets.chipdb.org/VIA/Nehemiah/VIA%20C3%20Nehemia... Apparently the researchers either couldn't find a copy or didn't notice that part.

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

#325

Post by kakarot »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #314
panda888888 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why trust Apple over Bloomberg? What if the hack were so bad (e.g. a keylogger + who knows what else) that none of the tech giants would ever admit it?

It's not about trust (at least for me). It's about the credibility of the account. "Journalists got something wrong" is a lot easier for me to believe than "there is a massive conspiracy to cover something up and there just so happens to be no evidence of it besides our say so."

I'm not saying I believe either party in this mess, but to be fair Occam's Razor is used very often to disregard legitimately viable conspiracy theories.

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

#326

Post by rrcaptain »

moftz wrote: post #135
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…

It's also possible Bloomberg's sources are lying to them. It's not unwarranted for intelligence agencies to leak things to the press deliberately to create a story.

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

#327

Post by peternicky »

catchaway727 wrote: post #165
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…

The Clinton administration and CIA tried to deny the China-Boeing technology transfer incident. But others in the CIA were concerned, raised the issue and were later proven right. I asked people in the CIA about the Bloomberg story and their response seemed to indicate that the story is real. There’s immense pressure to deny this story for several reasons.

Who are you? Why should anything you say be believed?

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

#328

Post by nradov »

bitreality wrote: post #288
nradov wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how the classification system works.

Nobody here knows how these cases truly work. There's some precedent where you can find gag orders, which make people think that Cook would simply go the "No Comment" route, but to assume those are a blanket procedure for everything is incredibly narrow-minded. When it comes to National Security, combined with the most valuable company in the US, all assumptions should be off the table. Apple has many reasons to publ…

This is paranoid nonsense. There is no federal law or precedent which could force a corporate officer to actively lie.

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

#329

Post by moftz »

garmaine wrote: post #222
vageli wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that a NSL can (legally) command the recipient to lie about it. Do you have a source for this statement? As far as I'm aware, you can be compelled to remain silent but not compelled to give a false statement.

You can be compelled to act exactly as you would as if the NSL had not been issued, and indeed they seem to contain language to that effect. A reasonable response would be to adopt a policy of "no comment" and most do, but if you have previously responded to questions about NSLs in the negative, you would then be required to continue doing the same. Q: Have you received an NSL? A: No. Q: Now have you received an NSL?…

Canaries only make sense if the company actually cares about letting their customers know about a possible NSL. They might not be legal as it's a pretty obvious wink wink nudge nudge that they received one. Apple and Amazon are big enough that they aren't going to mess around with utopian EFF rhetoric and will do whatever is required them by the law. None of the big boys care about "don't be evil" mantras anymore. They care about what keeps the stock price up and the federal government off their ass.

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

#330

Post by moftz »

tomtang0514 wrote: post #251
moftz wrote: 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…

Also Supermicro is not even a chinese company. It's based in San Jose and founded by taiwanese american...

All of their manufacturing is in China along with everyone else.
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