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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Assuming Bloomberg's story is true, I wonder what reason Apple has to hide. Not wanting to upset relations with the PRC govt?

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NSL letter, under active investigation

NSLs require secrecy not lying.

Couldn't an NSL have been served to datacenter operators, along with the notification of the attack, and the organisation's management simply be unaware?

They might volunteer to lie, though.

The snowden leaks among others show that most companies aware of PRISM ended up flat out lying about it. Either it's a type of NSL we haven't seen before or employees receive death threats, etc.

No, none of the companies lied about it. The companies worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit. They would obviously have no knowledge of a dowstream data processing system like PRISM.

I can think of a trillion reasons...

they have literally every reason to deny and literally no reason to say it's true

Except, you know, to avoid committing securities fraud by making a material misrepresentation.

There is no way that the intelligence community would allow that fraud case to go ahead.

That assumes that 1) the intelligence community has the power to stop it and 2) that Apple believes this to be the case and 3) that Apple is confident that the intel community would use that power to protect them. That seems like a reach to me.

#3 isn't the intel community protecting Apple, it would be protecting themselves, which is a lot more plausible. They don't want detailed information about the techniques coming out. Odds are good that the Bloomberg story is still incomplete in some critical way, and decent that even if the story as a whole is broadly-speaking "true" there's still an outright lie contained in it. My guess would be the way in which it was discovered.

I work for a company that sells network appliances, and I've been questioned by customers as to why I'm doing an SRV DNS lookup instead of a standard A DNS record lookup in some software I wrote, and had every detail of how I use TLS picked over by some customers. (More power to them. Not a complaint.) Some people run really tight networks. I wouldn't be surprised the real discovery mechanism was someone noticing the packets heading out that had implausible source-dest pairs ("why is my internal network that barely knows the internet exists trying to send packets to $RANDOM_LOCATION?"). If the people discovering this were actually the intel agencies themselves, for instance, they'd find another story to tell rather than reveal that. I am absolutely, positively not claiming this is true; I have no more evidence of it than anyone else. I'm just giving an example of the sort of thing I mean. It's also possible the intel agencies slipped a hint to someone about what to look for; again, I have no info to that effect, just an example of why they might not want something to go to court.

> Odds are good that the Bloomberg story is still incomplete in some critical way

You mean like this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18139371

They will absolutely step in when Apple decides to fight the case in court risking the exposure of sensitive info.

I'm reminded of Matrix-Churchill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms-to-Iraq

Although that nearly went in the other direction. The people involved were nearly sent to jail for shipping arms to Iraq which they had been doing at the behest and with the complicity of the UK security services.

The power of government agencies to turn up to people's offices and tell them "you need to stop doing what you're doing, and it's illegal to mention this meeting" should not be underestimated.

I think it's extremely foolish to think that the SEC would have the ability to overrule the CIA/NSA/other TLA when it comes to disclosure of this.

Not at all. It would be quite damaging to their reputation if it came out later that they were affected by this, knew it, and lied about it. Especially since the privacy of customer data is a key part of their marketing message these days.

Damaging how? People will stop buying iPhones? Be realistic.

Assuming the story is true, you lie lie lie until something bigger in the news happens then you quietly relent.

Personally I buy Apple because they are more private than android. I would look at alternatives if Apple was caught lying here.

Well, what was Apple's response to the PRISM revelations?

Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."

PRISM: "Collection directly from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple" A later slide claims that Apple joined the program in October 2012.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-... for those documents.

So, was Apple lying about PRISM? The Snowden documents certainly seem to support that position[1]. If they lied about PRISM, why would you trust them now?

[1]: Obviously there are possibilities like Snowden documents were wrong, or deliberate hoaxes, etc. Spy games are fun!

What percentage of stories like this do you think never come out publicly? 50%? 90%?

This article is more or less total bullshit. At _best_ that device might be a mechanism to cause failure intentionally. And there are tons of ways to detect it with commodity technology, and plenty of vendors who implement that technology for assembly manufactures commercially.

That’s what I thought but then it says it’s hooked to the BMC bus. It’s basically a small IME device with no java bloatware to run. I’d think it’s reasonably credible

My issue isn't whether or not it's possible for hardware to be insecure or whether or not it's possible for exploits to exist.

My issue is this Chinese undetectable super chip creating unpreventable wide-scale vulnerabilities.

For what it's worth, I've worked in hardware security and I own a hardware quality control startup.

> I wonder what reason Apple has to hide.

The perception is that Apple is perfect and worth paying 3x the cost?

EDIT: Curious if all of these Apple comments are going to disappear. I believe they have a strong marketing team to hide dissent.

Or people recognize that statements like "The perception is that Apple is perfect and worth paying 3x the cost?" are hyperbolic nonsense.

This breaks the site guideline that asks you not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please don't do that—it's a toxic trope that leads to dumber threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: looks like we've already warned you about this more than once. If you keep doing it we're going to have to ban you, so please don't post like this again. Ditto for unsubstantive comments in general.

What evidence do you want? They only have 5 accounts with the ability to downvote. This is why comments always have -4 with anything critical of apple.

HN's software puts a floor of -4 on downvoted comments.

Please stop this now.

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