Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence.

The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has other aspects that are very unlikely.

It has also been denied far more strongly than the Snowden leaks were.

The biggest problem is really why would you do this? Either the report is wrong in significant ways, or it’s not true at all.

The chip they show in the article, is a ceramic package which it would be really hard to embed a semiconductor in (because of the temperatures required to fire the ceramic). It looks like it probably would sit on an alternate footprint for the BCM flash. A ceramic part like that (which they say is for signal conditioning) doesn’t belong at that location anyway.

If your going to develop some weird SMD capacitor sized package for a microcontroller... why not just develop a new BCM serial flash chip embedding the same functionally? At least that way the boards would look visually similar.

So much just doesn’t make sense to me.

The Snowden leaks were denied plenty by the companies involved.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect?

My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.

And what about Amazon and Apple's denial will be found technically incorrect in a few years.

EDIT: to the downvoters, its easy to play this game, Apple makes a large amount of very specific denials.

    Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal
    investigations based on their inquiries and each 
    time we have found absolutely no evidence to support 
    any of them.

    Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware 
    manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted 
    in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI
    or any other agency about such an incident. We are not
    aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our 
    contacts in law enforcement. 

What about investigations and law enforcement contacts via a third party (perhaps a specialized hardware security firm? )

    Our best guess is that they are confusing their story
    with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we 
    discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro 
    server in one of our labs.

You mean the story they explicitly denied with similar strength (and wiggle room to boot when the truth came out)

    Apple is deeply committed to protecting the privacy and
    security of our customers and the data we store. We are
    constantly monitoring for any attacks on our systems,
    working closely with vendors and regularly checking 
    equipment for malware. We’re not aware of any data being
    transmitted to an unauthorized party nor was any
    infected firmware found on the servers purchased from 
    this vendor.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple...

These denials match up exactly with what was in the leaked documents. Greenwald and Snowden, out of incompetence, made a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations that were not supported by the documents that the companies denied.

Actually, there was a storm of denial and attacks on snowden's character in main stream media after the leaks ("high school drop out", "low level contractor" etc).

The Guardian is an established newspaper with a firm commitment to (what it sees as) the truth, and has a top-flight internal technical team which gives them credibility on this kind of topic. (Interestingly we did see an internet split after the Guardian reported vulnerabilities in WhatsApp's security, but at least in that case there was no dispute on the facts, only their interpretation).

Bloomberg is an upstart with an awkward funding model which has already faced serious, credible allegations of political interference and a lack of journalistic integrity (a major investigative story about corruption in China was allegedly spiked at a late stage by management for business reasons).

I wouldn't call them an upstart. They've been around for 23 years and produce some impressive content, but you are correct regarding the story about the families of the Chinese leaders and potential conflict of interest given Bloomberg L.P.'s business.

After the Xi story appeared, terminal sales in China slowed because government officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. The Bloomberg News website was also blocked on Chinese servers, and the company was unable to get visas for journalists it wanted to send to China.

In 2014, Grauer told staff at the Bloomberg Hong Kong bureau that the company's sales team had done a "heroic job" of mending relations with Chinese officials who had indicated their displeasure about publication of the Xi revelations. He also warned that if Bloomberg "were to do anything like" the Xi story again, the company would "be straight back in the shit-box."

On October 29, 2013, during a conference call, Winkler told four Bloomberg journalists in Hong Kong that the findings of their major investigation into "the hidden financial ties between one of the wealthiest men in China and the families of top Chinese leaders" would not be published. Less than a week later, a second planned article "about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks," was also killed, according to Bloomberg employees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News#China_coverage

Are we meaning the same Bloomberg News? Hasn’t it been around, at least for business news, since about 1990? If so, that seems to me to be well past the upstart stage. But maybe they rebranded or reformed and have no relation to the other name?

I perceive them as an upstart in traditional-journalism terms, certainly compared to a newspaper that was founded in 1821.

So they're lying because they've only been around for 30 years? What sort of logic is that.

They don't have the same level of history and reputation that the Guardian does. So people don't trust them as much as the Guardian. Which seems fair and reasonable.

It is shoddy journalism, or rather propaganda when anonymous is really a CIA/MOSSAD etc, as is the case with Bloomberg et al.