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

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

#231

Post by acct1771 »

drb91 wrote: post #225
sonnyblarney wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So why are you rambling on about unrelated pet topics in HN threads?

Do you truly believe his point to be unrelated, this isn't a debate about GP's tone?

I think what parent touches on in their "tangent" is indeed the most important thing to come out of this story.

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

#232

Post by ardy42 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #142
paxys wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need ONE board to be able to prove it. Surely Bloomberg or their sources can get their hand on a single piece?

So if a newspaper wanted evidence that your company fucked up you would go and dismantle company property to discredit your employer knowing that it's likely to damage them and ruin you.

> So if a newspaper wanted evidence that your company fucked up you would go and dismantle company property to discredit your employer knowing that it's likely to damage them and ruin you.

The informant may have perfectly accurate information but be completely unable to provide physical evidence. For instance: they could have been briefed on the matter, but still have no physical access to the datacenter or to the location where the compromised servers were taken to.

A lot of the demands for physical proof make the false assumption that someone who knew about the spy chips and talked to Bloomberg would have had physical access to an example. That's simply not the case. How many of us work as software engineers in Fortune 500 companies, and how many of us could walk into one of our employer's datacenters and take a photo of the motherboard of a particular machine that we frequently work with? Not many, I'd imagine.

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

#233

Post by simonh »

monocasa wrote: post #206
simonh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crimes are committed by individuals, not companies. If execs at VW break the law, you go after the execs, you don’t put the whole company in jail or turf out all it’s employees on the streets.

HSBC laundered nearly a billion dollars for terrorists and Mexican cartels. Which execs faced any legal repercussions again? https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h...

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be repercussions, check my comment again, but there’s no point putting the bank tellers out of work because their bosses, bosses, bosses, bosses boss broke the law.

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

#234

Post by fit2rule »

monocasa wrote: post #201
tomjakubowski wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be politicians who ignored any of the "IC" analysis that contradicted their claims, and made up their own conclusions from dubious sources of "raw" intelligence like Ahmed Chalabi.

Bullshit. Straight from the CIA's NIE, page 9: > High Confidence: > Iraq is continuing, and in some areas is expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolution. > Iraq could make a nuclear weapons in months to a year if it acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material. https://www.scribd.com/doc/259216899/Iraq-October-2002-NIE-o... I'm not sure where this "the IC is this…

Don't bother trying - its not possible in todays political climate for people to be enlightened as to just how much damage has been done to the world by the 'intelligence' community. The CIA is the #1 source of conflict and trouble in the world - but American citizens have a very hard time with the self-reflection required to see this fact. This is by design: their society has been engineered to allow the secret spooks to rule, comfortably, without interference from public policy makers.

Time and again, we see the CIA, and other of US' TLA-agencies, directly causing world turmoil - and yet a blind eye is turned, because "at least its our guys doing it", etc.

The world would be a much, much better place if American citizens paid more attention to what their spy masters are doing in the world. Secrecy is the lynchpin of all corruption: the fact that American's worship their secret-keeping institutions as beyond reproach, the reason we have so much turmoil in the world.

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

#235

Post by SoylentYellow »

simonh wrote: post #145
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…

Let’s size up the options. Bloomberg is wrong. Apple and Amazing have every incentive to strongly deny the story. Bloomberg is right. Multiple employees up to executive level at 30 US companies and the government know about it and are actively leaking to Bloomberg about it. Numerous boards are out there at 30+ companies as physical evidence. There’s no way Apple and Amazon could risk denying this so strongly. It’s al…

Or option 3: Bloomberg is was fed false information by the US government to cultivate distrust of Chinese sourced electronics. Not a bad tactic if you want to prevent Chinese infiltration in sensitive industries while also using it for political and economic leverage.

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

#236

Post by ardy42 »

PeterisP wrote: post #98
ihuman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they had to go with anonymous sources as opposed to any physical evidence What do you mean by the second part of this? Bloomberg should have received examples of comprised boards?

Not necessarily received, but at least seen them and verified that the described thing actually exists. If they don't even have a single frigging photo that they can show us (up until now they have only shown CGI renderings that they fabricated themselves showing how it might have looked), then that seems to imply that they haven't done any due diligence.

> Not necessarily received, but at least seen them and verified that the described thing actually exists. If they don't even have a single frigging photo that they can show us (up until now they have only shown CGI renderings that they fabricated themselves showing how it might have looked), then that seems to imply that they haven't done any due diligence.

I don't know about you, but I certainly couldn't get a photo of the motherboard of a dev server I work with every day, let alone take a reporter to go take a look at it. That doesn't mean I don't have accurate information to base a story on, and it doesn't mean someone else can't corroborate that information.

Reporting isn't about gathering physical evidence, it's about gathering and cross-checking testimony and documents. If credible people in the government and an NGO testify that there was a poison gas attack at a certain location, a reporter can legitimately write an article about it. That reporter isn't going to sit on the story until they go to the attack site, collect samples, and sent them to a lab; nor should they.

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

#237

Post by krn »

simonh wrote: post #151
IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #59

2016 report by ARS Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/repor... 2017 followup by ARS Technica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple... So the story is 2 years old from a reporting standpoint.

Dodgy firmware is nothing new, it’s just compromised code after all.

According to Bloomberg, that's how everything started:

> Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline. Two of the senior Apple insiders say the company reported the incident to the FBI but kept details about what it had detected tightly held, even internally. Government investigators were still chasing clues on their own when Amazon made its discovery and gave them access to sabotaged hardware, according to one U.S. official. This created an invaluable opportunity for intelligence agencies and the FBI—by then running a full investigation led by its cyber- and counterintelligence teams—to see what the chips looked like and how they worked.

If this was true, the public denials wouldn't surprise me at all.

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

#238

Post by tralarpa »

SoylentYellow wrote: post #235
simonh wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s size up the options. Bloomberg is wrong. Apple and Amazing have every incentive to strongly deny the story. Bloomberg is right. Multiple employees up to executive level at 30 US companies and the government know about it and are actively leaking to Bloomberg about it. Numerous boards are out there at 30+ companies as physical evidence. There’s no way Apple and Amazon could risk denying this so strongly. It’s al…

Or option 3: Bloomberg is was fed false information by the US government to cultivate distrust of Chinese sourced electronics. Not a bad tactic if you want to prevent Chinese infiltration in sensitive industries while also using it for political and economic leverage.

Option 4: Bloomberg is working on another story and the government is trying to taint their credibility by feeding them false information, so nobody will believe them when the real story comes out.

(I just wanted to point out all options)

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

#239

Post by whatupmd »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #149

(disclaimer: I worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 as Technology Evangelist, and know Andy Jassy personally) I know nothing specific about the issue per se, but I am convinced that Andy Jassy is speaking the truth here, for two reasons: 1) I've never seen a company as obsessed with security as AWS, and/or with such a big budget for security. 2) There's so many actors/employees involved in the audits, security, etc, that…

Creating an illusion of security does not mean that something is actually secure.

Here's an example - AWS VPC connections only supports IKEv1. (https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=252723) (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/adminguide/Introducti...)

IKEv1 vs. IKEv2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Key_Exchange#Improvem...

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

#240

Post by jakobegger »

tralarpa wrote: post #238
SoylentYellow wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or option 3: Bloomberg is was fed false information by the US government to cultivate distrust of Chinese sourced electronics. Not a bad tactic if you want to prevent Chinese infiltration in sensitive industries while also using it for political and economic leverage.

Option 4: Bloomberg is working on another story and the government is trying to taint their credibility by feeding them false information, so nobody will believe them when the real story comes out. (I just wanted to point out all options)

Option 5: A journalist that really wants to land a scoop has a hunch that something is going on, and collects all the rumors and theories about hardware hacks, blurs the lines between speculation and facts, creates a plausible narrative that is too good to pass, and somehow persuades the editor that a dozen sketchy rumors must be enough to run a story.
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