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France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

reuters.com

241–250 of 270 posts

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#241

My trust of bloomberg has been pretty low since the spy chip story, that seems to have been just a hoax. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is the scale at play with the Supermicro story. If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly…

Even if the number of boards was small, there should be some form of tangible proof instead of them just going off statements of unverified "sources".

I haven't read a single bloomberg article since they published that story. Journalistic integrity is very important to me.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#242
post #202

Isn’t Vinci SA the operator of all those French toll highways that were supposed to be free once construction was paid off, but continued to be tolled anyway?

Like in most govt project, I'm sure they found a good excuse for why they were off budget, and thus needed more money. I presume too big to fail works everywhere!

The highways are actually privately operated. The privatization of highways was a big public issue back in the days, with most people against it arguing that it will lead to an increase in prices due to the profit-seeking nature of the operators.

Turns out, they were right, and in hindsight, privatization is a failure as far as the highway users are concerned.

But please, carry on with your factless dogma.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#243
post #232
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Super Micro knows they didn’t do it, they should absolutely love the story. Buyback the underpriced shares and make a ton of free money once the market realized the Bloomberg story is false. I don’t know if they actually did that, but that’s what I would have done. I didn’t actually do that because I trusted Bloomberg a lot. But there was substantial profit to be made as an insider. I bet many/most employees made…

Would that be legal, or counted as insider trading? Since you're trading on relevant information not available to the public.

You can’t steal from your own company, so it’s fine. You have to tell investors that you didn’t do it though.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> push against the First Amendment This isn't a freedom of speech issue since obviously they were free to say whatever they wanted, lies and misinformation included. This doesn't imply freedom from consequences. Causing a company to lose 18% value because they couldn't be bothered to verify is negligence, incompetence, or malice (or a combination) not freedom of speech and it's only fair to receive a fine. Bloomberg…

By that same logic, throwing someone in jail for insulting the President wouldn't be a violation of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does indeed mean freedom from consequences for your speech - at least governmental consequences.

If your speech negatively impacts another citizen, and your speech turned out to be all lies, you are absolutely liable for the consequences of it. The "government" is simply here to handle the arbitration.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#245
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is the scale at play with the Supermicro story. If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly…

Even if the number of boards was small, there should be some form of tangible proof instead of them just going off statements of unverified "sources". I haven't read a single bloomberg article since they published that story. Journalistic integrity is very important to me.

What if all extant examples of these boards are in some NSA laboratory? Bloomberg could plausibly have sources that know of the boards but don't have the ability to steal one of the boards for Bloomberg.

(Emphasis on plausibly, which is not the same as probably.)

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#246
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any guesses to why aren't Super Micro or other affected parties taking legal action, if it was a hoax like what's reported in this case?

If Super Micro knows they didn’t do it, they should absolutely love the story. Buyback the underpriced shares and make a ton of free money once the market realized the Bloomberg story is false. I don’t know if they actually did that, but that’s what I would have done. I didn’t actually do that because I trusted Bloomberg a lot. But there was substantial profit to be made as an insider. I bet many/most employees made…

It could also be the case that it never happened but Super Micro doesn't know for certain that it never happened. They may be pretty sure it never happened but unable to rule out the possibility that some portion of their organization was compromised by an intelligence agency.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. They got a good deal at our expenses following these outrageous privatisation. Meanwhile, some Spanish highways eventually got paid off and are becoming toll-free.

Since French highways often refuse non-EU credit cards at their toll booths, they have a special place in my heart.

That all changed with chipped cards - they work fine now (at least for my preferred ones).

Of course, that didn't help in 2017 when we had to get one of the tellers to do a on-the-spot conversion of dollars to euros at marginal rate of about 200 USD to 100 EUR (way higher than interbank rate) - we had no choice, and no one to complain to.

I'm not sure the teller enjoyed the transaction either.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It just kinda...disappeared. This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article. Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn'…

Super Micro's stock dropped about 30% and took months to recover.

I wonder if there were fraudulent stock transactions during that period (ie, not insider trading but stock manipulation).

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#249
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Leif Olson https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/bloomberg...

Bad example. All of the allegations in the Bloomberg article were true. Leif Olson actually did all of the things alleged, however the Bloomberg article missed that he supposedly did these things as satire...because Olson didn't actually bother to clarify that his posts were satirical until several days after they were made (and importantly, several days after the article itself was originally written). Both Olson an…

Oh hai Mayor B,

You forgot the part where the reporter deliberately cut off the part of the post that referred to the comment as satire.

Re: France's AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax

#250
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT article was correct. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act applies to discrimination on the basis of nationality, color, or race. By using Title VI, the Trump administration defined Jews as a race, color, or nationality. However, as Jews come in many races and colors already, the logical conclusion was that the Trump administration was defining Judaism as a nationality. Additional support for this comes from the f…

No, it was not correct. You can read the executive order for yourself: https://jewishinsider.com/2019/12/exclusive-a-first-look-at-... And I again recommend this thread from Yair Rosenberg: https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/120457682761800499... I posted the relevant original excerpt and what it was changed to. It is unequivocally different, and such a substantive change almost always necessitates a clarifica…

I did read the executive order. It refers to Title VI, which works the way I described in my comment.
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