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Re:The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, ... by jerf on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:38AM (#18139744)
There is a lot of information in the Bloomberg story, which I mean in the information-theoretic sense, and not in the sense that it must be "true" information for any definition of "true". A lot of very specific claims. Those claims did not come from the reporter writing the story, which is about 99.9999% likely to be incapable of making up such a plausible story with such details.

So one must think about "Where did this information come from?"

It is at least a plausible theory that the story is largely true (though as I posted in another thread, I'd bet money it's not all entirely true), and that the denials are either made by people who are unaware of the truth, or are being made deliberately. (Actually, the people who literally prepared those statements almost certainly believe the truth of the statements. One of the most plausible ways for a group of people to lie is for all communication to come from individuals who genuinely believe the lies; no body language tells or any other such leakage about it not being true.)

It is also plausible that the denials are in fact true, in which case one is left with the very interesting question of "Where did all that information come from and why is it wrong?"

As a couple of people have also said, there's also the option that the story is largely true, and the denials are true if you parse and read them like a lawyer, but meant to mislead anybody who doesn't. I can't say I've examined them for that, but it's definitely a possibility to consider.

I'd actually suggest "propaganda" isn't a great explanation; propaganda does not generally depend on making lots of specific, refutable claims, and certainly not followed up by refutations immediately. It is usually designed to speak directly to people's emotions and fan pre-existing flames in ways specifically designed to not be refutable. If this really was government propaganda (note how that is more specific than my previous unqualified "propaganda", because anybody can propagandize, not just governments), I would expect the American companies would be strong-armed into agreeing with the story for the propaganda's purposes, or that the story would never run at all if they couldn't be sure the companies weren't going to back them.

An alternate theory that might fit all the facts is industrial espionage. Let's say the story is completely untrue, the denials completely true. What is the result of this story? Supermicro in particular stands to lose some business. Perhaps someone who benefits from that planted this story.

Another alternative is stock market shenanigans. As I write this, the delayed feeds aren't showing it yet, but Supermicro stock (SMCI) just took a 31% bath overnight. Who benefits? Short sellers, put option traders.

I have no idea myself. "Unknown unknown" is still a pretty large chunk of my personal probability estimates.

Re:The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, ... by hendzen on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:46AM (#18139809)
Supermicro was already delisted prior to this article and had about $370k of US dollar trading volume yesterday in the OTC markets. Don't think people will make much money shorting it as this point, since it is already so illiquid. Highly doubt that is the explanation for the article.

EDIT: I read the volume amount incorrectly - it's more like 6m of volume which is not too bad. Someone could probably make money shorting it but again since its delisted already it would be difficult/risky to do so.

Re:The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, ... by jerf on Thursday October 04, 2018 @09:58AM (#18139909)
Thank you. I was trying to make sense of the news stories listed below the stock listing.

Whatever is going on with whatever stock is being traded is now visible even in the delayed listings; you can see it on https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SMCI?p=SMCI&.tsrc=fin-srch or your choice of provider.

Re:The Big Hack: Statements From Amazon, Apple, Supermicro, ... by sct202 on Thursday October 04, 2018 @12:34PM (#18141393)
I wonder if their delisting is related to this hack, or if it's a sign that they have poor internal controls and the company is just poorly controlled every where from accounting to engineering.