BuzzFeed News:
Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview with BuzzFeed News, went on the record for the first time to deny allegations that his company was the victim of a hardware-based attack carried out by the Chinese government. And, in an unprecedented move for the company, he called for a retraction of the story that made this claim.
Bloomberg’s response will likely only be “we stand behind our story” but it’s good to see Cook continuing to pressure them to put up or shut up.
It does prompt Bloomberg to issue /some/ response, though, and at least internally review this further. I think this is so prominent that author bad-faith is not enough to stop such a process.
I agree they would never reveal their sources, but I can’t help but wonder if said sources fed Bloomberg, trying to stoke trade war sentiment and stitching together scattered datapoints to make a narrative.
I believe Apple.
That said, I don’t know that I can get behind “put up or shut up,” which amounts to “reveal your sources.” Assuming good faith by the authors, revealing sources that spoke under condition of anonymity isn’t cool unless you can identify which knowingly passed or made up bad information. Assuming bad faith by the authors, nothing useful will come from it. Just another clusterfuck.
I want to see a single board with this chip on it. They claim they talked to 17 sources. Let’s see a Supermicro board with this chip. They don’t need to reveal who gives it to them but I think seeing an actual board compromised like this would go some way toward proving that these things at least exist.
This should be the main priority for Bloomberg BEFORE they published the piece, no?
“You are absolutely correct Mr. Senior Director of Security Technology at Apple: a national security gag order can prevent you from talking but it cannot order you to lie to the press or to Tim Cook. Your legal analysis is right on point there. By the way, are you aware that your daughter has 25g of marijuana in her locker at school? More than an ounce – that’s felony territory. And at 17 she can be tried as an adult in that jurisdiction. So there are two possibilities today: the local DEA office accompanies your school district’s security team on their random drug sweep at your daughter’s school in 30 minutes. Or the local DEA office requests that the school security team bring their drug dog to assist with a search of a warehouse on the other side of town this morning. Up to you. Or is that sweep starting in 7 minutes? I can’t remember.”
You’d think so.
conspiracy nonsense. you’re grasping at straws and it’s pathetic
I have absolutely no idea what is going on with the Bloomberg story, in that:
1) hardware subversion of this type has been discussed since the early 1980s and during the 80s/90s as the microchip industry spread worldwide the NSA was said to be particularly paranoid about the sourcing of the systems they used, going so far as to manufacture some of their own chips
2) Bloomberg claims to have worked the story for a year and have 17 confidential sources. Major business publications don’t put that kind of effort into a story unless there is something there – or appears to be there
3) Given how much Trump hates Bloomberg you’d think they would have been alert to the possibility of gaslighting by Trump’s strategy [sic] team
3a) Then again, while reporters are notoriously suspicious they are also very proud of that reputation, so maybe not
4) Several corporations named as victims have issued strong public denials. Apple in particular has issued the strongest denial we have seen from a public company since the era of all-spin marketroid speak started ~1990
So we don’t know what happened or what the real situation is. And probably never will, although that tells you something in itself.
That said, if you think that conversations such as the one in my scenario above don’t happen you are… naive.