Not taking a postion here, but given motivations it's hard to know what to conclude

> That's not what you do when you're trying to brush something off.

It /could/ be what you do if good relations with the Chinese government are crucial to your business (true for both Apple and Amazon).

As for the UK NCSC, it's bizarre that they would comment at all. One possible motivation: eagerness to discover how to use such a backdoor themselves

> “The NCSC engages confidentially with security researchers and urges anybody with credible intelligence about these reports to contact us”

> They're not "maintaining ignorance"; they're categorically denying it

What makes you think the people denying it know about it though? E.g. if the head of Apple security got served an NSL, wouldn't that potentially prevent them from telling the company lawyers or the executive team?

But the Bloomberg story says that they replaced thousands of servers. How would you get permission and funding to do that without saying anything?

It's a curious forum we're on where on one day there are jiggabytes spilled over how journalists get technical things wrong and on another, they're so reliably accurate, technology organizations making the case reporting on them is inaccurate must have been infiltrated by men in black and have had hapless employees flashed with a neuralyzer.

Can you please not post unsubstantive comments?

HN has 5M monthly users. Obviously there isn't going to be any consistency.

It's not an 'unsubstantive' comment. There is a very large section of users who are ardent believers in the 'Gell-Mann amnesia' effect. There are also seemingly many, many users, as the one I'm replying to and many who've posted similar, highly voted comments on this thread whose explanation for the discrepancies between the reporting on this story and the company responses amount to (in my view) to MiB but with different acronyms. I find that curious. Maybe you don't, maybe you think those users don't overlap much or at all, that's fair enough. But 'things people find curious about HN that you think maybe aren't' is not 'unsubstantive' so get of my case, oppressor!

This is a rare instance where I agree that 'dang has jumped the gun. I don't see how your comment is insubstantial either, and I think HN's weird relationship with the news media is worthy of comment. No reasonable person reads the comment above to mean "literally everyone on HN has inconsistent beliefs about the press".

> HN's weird relationship with the news media is worthy of comment

If I had said something about trusting Bloomberg or the media then sure. But that’s a completely different topic that’s not even remotely related to whether Apple’s denials on potential NSL issues are reliable.

How are those two topics not intimately related? The question of how reliable Apple's employees are is only relevant to the extent that you believe Bloomberg's reporters were competent in sourcing the story.

Thanks, now I'm regretting not going with the pithier 'ur mom has 5M monthly users' a little less.

Apart from that not being remotely what's being said, HN is not one person, it's a lot of different people with different opinions, commenting on different articles.

I'm not sure what is 'remotely not being said' and I have some vague understanding of the idea HN is not one person.

But there are definitely two (among many) strong tribes of HN-popular belief - let's call them the Gell-Mannicheans and the National Security Epistoleros. It's weird (to me) that they rarely meet in threads on stories concerning both! That could be because they live in different timezones or have different interests. It could be that the Epistoleros are just that much more numerous or that for some people epistolerism trumps gell-mannicheism. Or something else altogether. I find it a curious thing to observe and think about - it's not some underhanded 'zomg lolz, I have caught you in logic error' comment.

At this point it's clearly down to Bloomberg / Businessweek to bring more evidence to the table, and support their story further. The other side has entirely put the ball back in Bloomberg's court. Their credibility will be severely thrashed by this if they don't.

I don’t believe that. No one will remember in a week or two.

SuperMicro shareholders might.

Indeed. SuperMicro is the victim so far.

If trustworthiness amounted for anything in today's world, all major news agencies would be out of business.

Why limit yourself to news agencies? If trustworthiness amounted for anything, nearly all corporations big enough to have a PR department, and all governments would be out of business.

How is "we have found no evidence of..." categorically denying? They're doing exactly what parent says, turning a blind eye to it, and "truthfully" saying they haven't seen anything amiss.

Because it explicitly contradicts Bloomberg's story, which repeatedly claims Apple had knowledge of compromised hardware.

The story claims that the Apple worked with the FBI to investigate the issue, and Apple is saying no such cooperation ever happened. There really is no way to square these two sides; somebody is either wrong or lying.

Right. Wouldn't the inside sources also know if Apple/Amazon were somehow gagged? If you're going to leak the whole story, why not leak that part too?

I have reason to believe that Apple and Amazon (and intelligence agencies) silo some data internally on a need-to-know basis wherever possible. A leaker shouldn’t be capable of leaking everything.

Sure, but it wouldn't make sense to only relay the gag order to a subset of people who were aware of an incident - that would add risk and defeat the purpose of the risk-mitigating silos that you're suggesting.

So not one of the fifteen Bloomberg sources knew about any kind of gag order or reason for Apple/Amazon to deny these claims? Just saying that seems unlikely.