111–120 of 355 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If newspapers were in it for the money they wouldn't be newspapers. It's not an incredibly lucrative business.
Correlation != causation. The fact that most newspapers aren't lucrative doesn't mean they don't value profit.
Let's say Super Micro is right and there were no malicious hardware at all for sure. What are the consequences for Bloomberg for this incompetence? I mean, there needs to be something.. Just because you're a news organization, you can't simply escape with "Oh, my bad". This had real implications on stock prices of so many companies and wiped off shareholder value on many of them, including Super Micro. If Bloomberg's…
The companies/shareholders being affected by this are free to sue the paper over defamation. Something tells me they won't.
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Their reporters are compensated based off of whether or not they move markets. Did you know that? ( https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa... )
Unless their reporters are trading stocks of stories they cover, that's a non-issue.
The policy of rewarding them for moving the market simply removes the intervening steps and directly rewards them.
In concept, this only makes it worse. How much worse depends on how compensated they are, which I don't know. (e.g., if the bonus is $50 and your boss buys you a latte the next morning, it's not really that big a deal, vs. if it's $25,000 and everyone knows it's a fast track to promotions it's a pretty significant problem)
Let's say Super Micro is right and there were no malicious hardware at all for sure. What are the consequences for Bloomberg for this incompetence? I mean, there needs to be something.. Just because you're a news organization, you can't simply escape with "Oh, my bad". This had real implications on stock prices of so many companies and wiped off shareholder value on many of them, including Super Micro. If Bloomberg's…
When the state department tells you to write a story you write the story, or face the real prospect of the end of access which will be the end your journalism career. Not an ideal system for anyone, except the state department.
And because if it had been a government push, it would have been accompanied by a government PR push on other fronts. But I saw no evidence the government picked up this story in particular, or even hardly referenced it. Being now months later we can also observe the government has not lifted a finger to substantiate this storyline or pull Bloomberg's bacon out of the increasingly hot fire.
The theory that this was government-pushed falls down on the ground that even if the government or some aspect of it wanted to push this narrative, this is not even remotely their best choice on how to do it.
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Even if Bloomberg's story is completely true, Apple / Amazon / Super Micro might have no other choice, but to firmly deny it. Because in that case, it's United States vs. China, not just some publisher vs. a few publicly traded companies. When national security interests and international relationships between two largest economies in the world are at stake, it's not Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos, who get to decide, what ca…
> it's not Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos, who get to decide But who is, John Doe who dies on a grenade?
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No, they shouldn't just walk away. They should apply sound journalistic principles to investigate exactly how they came to the conclusion, and then publish that investigation with full disclosure. Not sure if I've ever seen a news organization do that though (minimal retractions in a place no-one looks doesn't count).
CBS Killian Papers pretty much. There have been some significant examples but there actually aren’t that many cases of a major pub running a “scoop” that no other major pub runs with as well that turns out to be flat out wrong. There are certainly examples of mainstream media as a whole getting behind a story like lead-up to Iraq War but this is something different.
People worry about malicious chips in instances like this and I mean it's a valid concern but one method of attack I've always thought would be effective and extremely dangerous is strategic placing a component in a circuit that, if it fails, disables the entire device then you simply need a way to activate it. Radio. Design a circuit, or better something that appears to be a capacitor and functions as a capacitor bu…
You could have reduced the idea to "instead of embedding microchips in other microchips, why not make a device that simply allows one to disable the device remotely? Surely the size requirements would be much smaller"
Instead you go semi-technical about something you know semi-nothing about.
There has to be more to this story that we don't know. Bloomberg has a lot to lose by publishing such a harsh claim that's not extremely fact-checked. Reliable newspapers generally don't throw around anonymous government sources without doing background checks on these people. I have little doubt that they got the information from who they say they did. At this point I wonder if they should stop protecting their sour…
> At this point I wonder if they should stop protecting their sources on this story and see if that shakes out any truth. That would be a mistake. Don't just throw your sources to the wolves if you couldn't prove their story. They should press their sources for proof, or stronger evidence. If they can't find any then they should issue a retraction.