What Happened with Supermicro?

Huh. so shortly after the story broke, I bought a bunch of SMCI. (It's actually the first OTC stock I've ever bought. It was easier than I thought, too... I had to call vanguard to enable OTC trading, but after that? super easy.) I sold it months later, at a pretty good profit, mostly 'cause while I think the bloomburg accusations are clearly false, there are huge accounting irregularities surrounding supermicro; getting delisted is no joke, and I'm super not qualified to evaluate that sort of risk.

but, my reasoning? my reasoning was that if it was a widespread physical hack, someone would discover it fairly quickly; I mean, people were tearing these boards apart, looking for anything. There's no way they could keep that quiet, even if they were willing to disappear people.

I can tell you that within my peer group, Bloomberg has taken a pretty huge reputational hit. I mean, sure, we all still read 'money stuff' because it's "the daily show" for financial news. It's great entertainment, and moderately edifying. But, you know, it's one of those things where after a newspaper writes about something in your field, you start wondering if they are that ridiculously uninformed about the things that aren't in your field.

So, I felt really pretty safe with buying in the dip.

Felt pretty bad for SuperMicro after they took the huge financial hit from the story which offered no physical proof. Glad to see they mostly recovered from it.

The story was extremely interesting, but as people dug into it, it seemed like the reporters had a bunch of conversations like this:

Security Researcher: So, in theory, you can do a lot of crazy stuff! Embed a tiny chip on a motherboard, stick it in an Amazon datacenter, sniff all sorts of things...

Reporter: Are you winking right now? I swear you are winking! So you are saying this is true? OMG. Wow, what a bombshell!

Security Researcher: I was not winking.

Reporter: Suuuuuuuuuuuuure you weren't.

The best part about all this is that I made money on it. That’s the problem with HN comments. There were people telling me “you know that Bloomberg are the guys that make the terminals everyone uses, right?”

Sure, I know. And when I told them that Bloomberg News is low quality news they didn’t believe me because pseudo-security-experts on HN are just cosplaying as a William Gibson character. They like the coolness of the sci-fi story of a Chinese company Ono Sendaing its way into Amazon. Paranoia does not a security professional make. Saying “state actor” doesn’t turn you into an expert.

Information and being able to discern knowledge sources: these are both money. And mindless regurgitation will never work. Just like it didn’t work at Facebook’s IPO. Wishing something is true doesn’t make it so.

But orchestrated by who? Surely not Bloomberg as they'd have too much to lose.

And if you have the means to do something like this, why not do it in a more subtle way that doesn't have people asking questions 6 months later?

I'm not suggesting you're wrong and I have no clue what happened.

from https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/02/super-micro-move-chip-pr...

> Server maker Super Micro is moving production out of China in a bid to allay US customer's concerns about spying, even though independent tests have shown no evidence of cyber espionage. The company has also announced its plans to expand its own in-house manufacturing facilities to help mitigate any perceived risks. A spokesperson for the company said Super Micro wants to be more self-reliant "without depending only on those outsourcing partners whose production previously has mostly been in China."