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Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

reuters.com

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Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#151

Post by ekianjo »

finnthehuman wrote: post #54
neya wrote: post #28

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…

>What are the consequences for Bloomberg for this incompetence? You, not the general concept of the reader, but you personally neya. You stop trusting Bloomberg's reporting. That's the consequence. Their reputation suffers. Why do threads like this on HN always have such a desire for retribution?

> Why do threads like this on HN always have such a desire for retribution?

Let's say the Bloomberg article incurred 50% loss of revenues after it was published for Super Micro. (just making up numbers for the sake of the argument). Following this, Super Micro would have to scale down their operations and potentially fire people.

That's just the same thing as sending a DMCA request on Youtube for something that is someone's own work. Currently it's "free" to do so, but don't you think there should be consequences in destroying someone's else business / reputation / work? How would you feel if it happened to you?

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#152

Post by Angostura »

hopler wrote: post #104
bob_theslob646 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can see how it incentivises sensationalism though. I was a tech magazine editor. I did my utmost to check the veracity of stories. I would have hated to think that my journalists were being incentivised to exaggerate.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#153

Post by Angostura »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #55
finnthehuman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What are the consequences for Bloomberg for this incompetence? You, not the general concept of the reader, but you personally neya. You stop trusting Bloomberg's reporting. That's the consequence. Their reputation suffers. Why do threads like this on HN always have such a desire for retribution?

Their reporters are compensated based off of whether or not they move markets. Did you know that? ( https://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-reporters-compensa... )

It's a shame Bloomerg isn't public. The retraction could earn someone a big bonus.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#154

Post by briandear »

hannasanarion wrote: post #130
scarhill wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WRT the how could they get it so wrong question, I guess it's time for the obligatory link to Michael Crichton's essay "Why Speculate?" and his discussion of the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" [1] Money quote: "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either t…

Not that Michael Crichton should be treated as an authority on truth in reporting. He believed there was a vast worldwide conspiracy to defraud poor innocent oil companies by manufacturing evidence of global warming.

For reference here is a Michael Crichton speech on the topic: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publica...

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#155

Post by pjc50 »

neya wrote: post #28

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…

So, when looking at this, we have to remember that reporters aren't analysts; they're not expected to have subject-specific background and make personal judgement calls as to what the underlying truth is. If you want that you can certainly get it - for a much higher price than a newspaper. That's what firms like Gartner are for.

Reporters to a very large extent report what sources say. Their judgement comes in considering the credibility of the source.

In this case they got a number of "credible" but anonymous sources. What they need to do now is make a choice:

a) burn the sources: publish the names and start investigating them and why they might have fed false information to Bloomberg. This will make it harder for them to get stories in the future, and may be considered a breach of journalistic ethics by some, but it also makes it less likely that people will try to play them like this in the future.

b) try to find some on-the-record sources for their story.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#156

Post by devy »

makomk wrote: post #112
mtgx wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies/shareholders being affected by this are free to sue the paper over defamation. Something tells me they won't.

They're free to sue the paper, but it'd be futile because the standard for such lawsuits to succeed in the US basically requires Bloomberg to have known that the claims were false. Just (say) completely ignoring normal journalistic practices to get a juicy scoop would not be enough.

> They're free to sue the paper, but it'd be futile because the standard for such lawsuits to succeed in the US

Not sure about whether Bloomberg was knowingly publishing false stories. But lawsuits causing media to bankrupt have precedence before - Gwarker Media, that was.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#157

Post by lmilcin »

neya wrote: post #28

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…

I believe freedom of speech and press is one thing but when you present serious and very specific allegations you should be able to back them up with comparably serious and specific proofs ("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"). Otherwise we are crossing the boundary between fact and fiction.

The way Bloomberg presented it in the article is as if they had entire story backed by facts. That was my takeaway they sounded pretty sure save for presenting the evidence. Now, what you do if press outright misrepresents the facts and presents fictional story as if it was entirely factual.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#159

Post by pstuart »

ghaff wrote: post #63
stareatgoats wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> CBS Killian Papers pretty much

Meh. I'm in the camp that believes Karl Rove pulled off one of his greatest dirty tricks of all time.

Re: Super Micro says review found no malicious chips in motherboards

#160

Post by freeflight »

neya wrote: post #28

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…

Nothing, just like nothing will happen to the outlets who are currently pushing this "Huwai is spying on everybody" narrative with not an ounce of evidence for it except for unfounded and unsourced claims by FiveEyes intelligence services [0].

Afaik that whole Bloomberg/Super Micro thing was similarly set up, referring to "anonymous intelligence/industry services", not even naming the company that supposedly did the security audit.

People have to realize that these kinds of narratives are often pushed by parties in the West, with a vested interest, just as much as it happens in the supposedly "propaganda riddled" East.

It's for those same reasons that the amendments to the Smith-Mundson act, which happened back in 2013, haven't seen any widespread attention or even mention anywhere in the mainstream [1] because the good guys don't do "propaganda", they do "interventions" [2] and "information campaigns" [3].

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/afa7fd54-79b1-11e8-bc55-50daf11b7...

[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

[3] https://vimeo.com/67739294

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