Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 289 posts

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#131

Post by akiselev »

sterlind wrote: post #102
leoc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly not the case that the US government has been above disinformation campaigns aimed at its own citizens even in the recent https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mirage-men https://www.dailygrail.com/2013/06/a-fractured-hall-of-mirro... or very recent https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-prog... past. Though of course there would be much more political risk in lying to Bloomberg News than in…

What evidence do you have that AATIP was a disinformation campaign? The UFO story was extremely weird, but I've seen no evidence that the Pentagon fabricated the footage, or somehow coerced Fravor into lying on primetime TV. Moreover, what would the Pentagon gain by running a UFO psy-op?

> Moreover, what would the Pentagon gain by running a UFO psy-op?

I've always wondered whether the magnitude of UFO sighting reports make it more difficult to glean intelligence about US aircraft/reconnaissance research. If, for example, Area 51 was responsible for cutting edge stealth aircraft research, it would be much more difficult to spy on the program through the civilian population if real sightings are indistinguishable from the flood of alien UFO sightings.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#133

Post by sonnyblarney »

Barrin92 wrote: post #100
sonnyblarney wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story is weird, and yes, they should be able to produce a board, surely. They maybe got caught with their pants down. But it doesn't matter - this is happening 100% guaranteed. 'We' do it and China has become far more aggressive in these areas these days ... so if they could be doing it, they would be. Someone should come up with a bit of proof though.

evidence is usually required for statements like " this is happening 100% guaranteed." I don't know what brave new world we have entered where journalists, or even online users for that matter, make confident claims about things for which there is no physical evidence.

A very close friend of mine led customer support for a large American IT company in the middle east where US federal agents were posed as support staff.

I worked at a large high-tech firm with business in the middle east, including content-filtering solutions and we were basically 'required' to work with Western governmental entities of a 'security nature'.

The US has massive clandestine projects in this regard and some of them are not so secret - consider the recent Wikileaks: [1]

"The US intelligence agency has been involved in a concerted effort to write various kinds of malware to spy on just about every piece of electronic equipment that people use. That includes iPhones, Androids and computers running Windows, macOS and Linux."

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

All countries with active spy/clandestine agencies are spying on one another using malware, spyware, hardware hacking, phishing, social engineering, whatever. And many firms are complicit to one degree or another.

That Apple or AWS etc. may have been compromised with a specific attack makes for a really weird story - but that this is happening in general is a non-story - of course it is. It's not about this specific attack really.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#134

Post by sonnyblarney »

drb91 wrote: post #125
sonnyblarney wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things are hacked often with a specific facility or installation in mind. It could be as little has a handful and that'd be enough to compromise a lot . I actually don't care what the truth [edit: truth of this specific BMRG story] is - the West needs a 'wake up call' on this one and any company installing hardware should be inspecting everything that comes in. Too much lax security out there, sadly, the US gov I don…

> I actually don't care what the truth is Why are you in this thread at all then?

Because 'the truth of the Bloomberg story' is not important - what matters is 'what's actually happening' in the world. And this kind of hacking is definitely happening irrespective of how right/wrong the Bloomberg report is.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#135

Post by trhway »

ariwilson wrote: post #124

Why was Google not affected by these Supermicro motherboards?

From my scouring some time ago on Ebay Google seems to use board designs modified and produces to their specs from some Taywan nonames. So while they also can potentially be similarly attacked, it wouldn't be the same attack.

Wrt. the subj of the Bloomberg story - back in 90ies Russian FSB would comb through the internals of every PCs they bought for their use. That though was before Intel ME :)

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#136

Post by mschuster91 »

paxys wrote: post #101
stupidbird wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most likely came from a ton of rumors that got conflated, hence why they had to go with anonymous sources Just noting that anonymous sources aren't unknown sources — if Bloomberg says that these are people working in US Intelligence then they've very likely validated it, but are protecting their identities by request. Also worth noting that Amazon and Apple have a tremendous amount to lose here. That doesn't mean th…

While something like this will no doubt be damaging to some large American tech companies, it is way worse for China. Are they really going to potentially devastate their entire economy over the long term over such an easy to detect hack?

> Are they really going to potentially devastate their entire economy over the long term over such an easy to detect hack?

That didn't make the NSA afraid of targeted interception campaigns.

I believe that secret services are doing everything we normal people dream of already, including stuff such as the hardware injections either in the Supermicro case or in the stuff the NSA did, and a good bunch more which we don't even know of yet.

Cyber warfare is all too real now.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#137

Post by verelo »

mtw wrote: post #116
sonnyblarney wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There should be hundreds of thousands or millions of these hacked motherboards" No, the boards would be selectively hacked. And we know it happens because 'we' do it as well. Surely there is evidence floating around but it's also unlikely that companies would want to admit the breach. I kind of believe Apple and Amazon though, there's too much risk if they were to be caught lying. This is a weird one ...

> And we know it happens because 'we' do it as well. What's the logic in this? This is like saying Saudis must be Christians because we are Christians as well

No it’s not. It’s much more like saying the Saudis probably killed the journalist because we do it too.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#138

Post by jahlove »

clamprecht wrote: post #83

If Bloomberg ends up retracting the story, then the new question, for me, is how did this happen? Was it simply Bloomberg trying to get views? Or is it more interesting, like did their "sources" intentionally give them a fake story in order to hurt their credibility? Or was it to cast doubt on the anti-China stories in general?

It should be pointed out that Bloomberg authors get bonuses if they write stories that move the market:

https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa...

Not saying that was necessarily a motivation here, but it's worth pointing out.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#139

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jackconnor wrote: post #9
nil_pointer wrote: post #2

[removed]

If that's the only question then the answer for every major company is "guilty". I don't think doing business in china means that Bloomberg gets to make up a bunch of BS from mysterious anonymous sources without a single piece of physical evidence, wiping out billions in market value, and just call it a day and we're all supposed to believe it because they use the word "China". I think we can probably hold them, and…

> Though, clearly there is a huge market for China-hating technopanic, no matter how little evidence or credibility there may be, since some people will literally believe anything if they think it's done in China.

China has only itself to blame for this.

If you threaten the nuclear option over an airline listing Taiwan as a country on their US website, what will people expect from you over an issue that could cost you billions in business?

It opens them up to exactly this kind of story, because it gives people reason to expect coerced speech. The price of censorship and coercion is a complete loss of credibility. Which means the debate continues over a story where the denials could otherwise have put the matter to rest already.

Re: AWS CEO Jassy follows Apple in calling for retraction of Chinese spy chip story

#140

Post by novaleaf »

verelo wrote: post #137
mtw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we know it happens because 'we' do it as well. What's the logic in this? This is like saying Saudis must be Christians because we are Christians as well

No it’s not. It’s much more like saying the Saudis probably killed the journalist because we do it too.

not sure why you are so downvoted on this (maybe less drama next time) but more or less right.

More specifically though, the Snowden docs showed how the usa does this kind of stuff on a one-off basis.

Post reply on HN