Heck, just the HN replies to previous discussion on this story had some comments from people who had jobs for a while detecting espionage on their boards, which were created precisely because some was found prior to that. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138699 You could make more hay with that story than a faked-up one. There's no need to lie for propaganda's sake, because the truth would be more than adequate! (The propaganda element would be in the spin and claims about the scale of the problem, not the brute facts, which certainly exist.)
If this ever was government propaganda, they changed their mind before finishing the job and hung Bloomberg out to dry.
At the moment, the best theory that seems to fit all the facts, including the comments from people who were interviewed for the story, is a not-sufficiently-technical reporter very motivated to tell this story (perhaps because of the reward for stories that move the markets?) who compounded confusion upon confusion in a domain they were suffering from Dunning-Kruger until they were able to write that story. And presumably, similar problems in the fact-checking and editorial staff. I'm still not guaranteeing this, but I'm giving it at least 75% at this point.
I suppose it also follows that the fab and design should be staffed only as NOFORN? That rules out the lead on the Apple silicon team.
I don’t think you understand how this works. This isn’t a nationalism vs globalism thing.
My comment is basically a pre-reaction to nationalists who would want to use this situation as an excuse to bring as much manufacturing work home as possible, even if it doesn't make sense (and if this were all a ruse, it would be a good way to get the White House on board.) Granted, it would also be pretty dumb to trust your adversary (from a national defence perspective) to build your weapons for you. Which is what the US is doing to a certain degree. Of course this is about globalism, because it's what lead to this situation in the first place. But nationalism, importantly, is not the solution. That's what I hope people take away from this.
My point via the contrived example is they countries are fictions and so is citizenship and presence in one or “possession” of one is no way a litmus test for “adversary” or even a reasonable proxy.
“China” isn’t a person, and so “China” can’t be an adversary. (Even if it could, that would be dumb, for reasons explained above.)
- PR a HW verification firm.
- manipulate a stock
- and many morehttps://risky.biz/RB517_feature/
He showed the “emails he sent to Bloomberg, prior to the story’s publication, that said the hardware back-dooring the article described “didn’t make sense”.”
Another text about that source:
https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/08/security-r...
Where's the smoking gun here? Why don't we have die shots of this thing? Why hasn't anyone on this very forum seen the C&C traffic from it phoning home to see if it was a target? Nothing about their explanation even seems remotely plausible. Why on earth would the attacker ever do something as obvious and annoying to deal with as what they supposedly did with altering the layout of the board and adding components instead of just backdooring the BMC? Are we supposed to believe that they were simultaneously competent enough to pull off Bloomberg's fairytale but too incompetent to have an altered BMC load backdoored firmware internally instead of off of an EEPROM chip on the board?
I'm not saying that we should rush to conclusions but Bloomberg has provided absolutely no sources with any shred of credibility. There's nothing to substantiate anything so why should the default stance be anything other than to consider that article a piece of cyberpunk fanfiction?
Somebody should be able to produce SOMETHING without giving up their sources. Why can't they produce any of this?
Which is easier? Telling me what you saw in someone else's safe, or giving me it's contents?
A random technician in a datacenter is under no obligation not to leak one unless he holds (or held) a clearance and has agreed to the terms of it.
Example - back when internet worms like SQL slammer were a thing, classification was a huge point of contention among gov security. At least in some agencies, because they were due to a vulnerability in a gov system, the IT/security staff were unable to discuss it with outside, uncleared people, because the vulnerability aspect made it classified. At the same time, knowledge of said worms and backdoors was public all over the news, and no reporters ever went to jail for discussing it.
This isn't so different - it only takes one person without a clearance to dig up one of these chips and publish pictures, and they can do so legally. The fact that it hasn't happened tells me this isn't a widespread problem.
It's possible there was a game of telephone or something else where the sources Bloomberg spoke with somehow ended up believing foreign propaganda, but I'm a bit skeptical of that.
Bloomberg is unreliable when it comes to Apple.
Either that or Bloomberg is lying.
Sounds more like Bloomberg was the messenger and is being silenced.
I'm aware how pedantic this may come across, but words matter, and in cases like this it seems dreadfully important not to fuel or even create conspiracy theories through carelessly (or perhaps carefully) chosen phrasing.
It's possible that Bloomberg got everything right, and that the vigorous denials from the cited companies and the objections from their own named sources and the actual denials (rather than "non-denial denials") from government agencies and the continued lack of corroboration from any other independent investigative or journalistic organizations is all part of a massive coordinated conspiracy to discredit this reporting, which this same international cross-government/corporate cabal somehow couldn't just stop from getting out. But is it likely? Really?