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Comment by propman | Hacker News Reader

For major major reports like this, reputed newspapers are rarely wrong. See WSJ John Crareyou of Theranos. Theranos vehemently denied it, MSM was with Theranos and at least they weren’t outright against them. Then they did more digging etc.

The Washpo digging on Roy Moore, the NYT digging on Clinton Foundation, etc. these are experienced reporters having 15-30 credible sources, evidence etc. every time this happens, everyone denies and slowly little by little the story finds more evidence and facts and it becomes true.

This is why a free press is soooo important

Why would Apple disclose that millions of their products could be hacked and you’ve lost all your privacy. Who would trust them? They’d lose billions, regulations would come etc. it’s in the best interest for every party to deny.

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On the other hand, Newsweek was wrong about Satoshi.

My suspicion is that there are many cases where the Chinese government is actually trying to insert backdoors into things, and that in particular Supermicro really has been compromised by the Chinese government, but the technical details of this chip are incorrect. That explains why so many government officials are eager to leak information to Bloomberg, but at the same time the technical details don't really make sense.

It isn't really in Amazon's and Apple's best interest to lie about this. When Gmail got hacked by the Chinese government, Google was pretty honest about it. China has a lot of resources so you can't really expect companies to fend off 100% of attacks on their own; it makes sense for them to acknowledge this publicly and get help from the US government when needed.

The Newsweek that published that article and the Newsweek that built the brand reputation are entirely separate entities.

The current Newsweek is no more formal journalism than Gawker is, which is to say occasionally they'll get big scoops but most of the time they're in the mud trying to get clicks/eyeballs.

Note that Facebook and Apple have confirmed that they had heard about and actually saw, respectively, security issues with compromised software updates from Supermicro - it's only the chip story they're denying. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

There's a huge diff between "your web management software is buggy" (pretty much every web management software is kinda crappy and significant number probably would dissolve like wet paper under a serious security audit) and "your motherboard has extra chip which grants full hw level access to outside parties". The former is completely routine and happens nearly every time anybody bothers to do a security audit. The latter, if true, is one of the biggest stories of the decade.

And even when Google was hacked by the US government, they're pretty up front about it and about addressing the problems. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...

Remember that this was during a time when the US Government was not run by incompetent hacks who lie all the time. The current political environment does not foster an open discussion as it used to be under the previous administration.

You aren't talking to Trump in incidents like these. Day-to-day interactions with bureaucracy are unlikely to have changed much.

Do you really believe that Trump hasn't infected the Federal bureaucracy? Federal Agencies are headed by political appointees and their assistants. Any reason to pummel the companies which have a (real or imagined) animus will be met with retribution. Just the other day he was falsely ranting about Google censoring Right-wing outlets

Newsweek's credibility is a long, long ways off any of the other outlets being mentioned here.

> When Gmail got hacked by the Chinese government, Google was pretty honest about it.

That hack involved several companies, most of whom were not up front about it.

So counter to your point, Bloomberg reported on a mid-sized company I worked for. The vast majority of the article was sourced from one disgruntled employee, and was completely untrue based on objective facts. An example I could verify visually was the supposition that executive X was hardly in the office. I sat 30 ft from executive X, and he was there every day.

I'm not saying this particular article is incorrect, just that I wouldn't strongly assume either direction without more information.

Was that a highly detailed front page investigative story? Because I’m specifically talking about those. For other cases, they are wrong quite frequently, some of the nonopinion articles on Bloomberg are often a few rungs above college journalism reporting. All elite papers are the same in that regard. The Nytimes just a few weeks ago they had a story that Nikki Haley spent tens of thousands of dollars on curtains and a possible corruption scandal which was easily disproven hours later. Those are usually junior journalists working on it alone, sometimes creating a story rather than reporting on one and fitting all the facts to match a singular narrative. These ones I’m talking about are different. They have a much higher level of checks and due dillegence.

Edit: I absolutely could be wrong and things could be disproven in this, but just in my experience highly detailed articles like this are usually right on the money or close but just like everything in the world, can’t say anything with certainty.

Yes, it was a major story which got a lot of attention and is still mentioned as a source by other journalists.

I think respectable MSM rarely lie about having sources and sources having said what they claim they said. However, sources can be chosen, and sources can lie, so the question is how deep your trust goes. This is why anonymous sources are always very problematic - you can trust that the paper accurately reported that somebody said something, but you have no idea if that somebody was lying or not.

You mean major major reports like Iraq WMDs?[1] Yeah, the press never gets major stories sourced from government sources wrong.

> Why would Apple disclose that millions of their products could be hacked and you’ve lost all your privacy. Who would trust them?

You've got it perfectly inverted. This is exactly why Apple would come clean if they've been hacked by a nation state and take further steps to protect their customers.

Case in point: This happened to Google.[2] Can you imagine how much trust Google would destroy if they vehemently pretended that the hacking never happened? As opposed to going public ASAP with an action plan, which is what they did -- and it improved trust.

These conspiracy theories are never very well thought through. Conspiracies leak. Remember how Watchmen ended?

[1] https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Agreed, I think you've stated your point better than I have further down in the thread based on my down votes.

The American press is not perfect, but over the years I've been really impressed with the journalistic skill of our major publishers. Just this week the New York Times had an extensive story regarding the president's tax returns, they claim to have access to hundreds of thousands of documents and spoke to dozens of sources. I'm more inclined to believe Bloomberg's journalistic integrity than the denials of Apple, Amazon and China.

Didn't Apple and/or Amazon (EDIT: not Amazon) categorically deny being involved in PRISM until Snowden's slides showed that to be false?

As I understand it, there was (and still is) some room for confusion here: (1) PRISM was an internal code name so of course they hadn't heard of it. (2) there was apparently some kind of API or data transfer for sending national security requests to the companies involved and returning the results. A vague PowerPoint slide was misinterpreted by reporters as "direct server access".

This is sort of like claiming that you have root access to Google's servers just because you have a Gmail account.

So the companies could deny that, but there is still a question of exactly what was (is) possible using whatever API they exposed, and what sort of legal review the companies do of the requests they get, and whether this review restricts what the government can do in a meaningful way.

Apple was listed on the PRISM slides but not Amazon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)...

I'd also underline how convenient this news is for the current administration - move production back home. The article is much more damaging to the Chinese hardware suppliers than Apple/Amazon which will likely get over it soon.

>They’d lose billions

This is exactly it. There's no cost to deny, deny, deny until it's impossible, then "oops, after extensive investigations we've found the claims to be true on a limited number of devices...".

But Bloomberg is reporting thousands of affected devices and Apple/Amazon have said they've already done extensive investigations and are totally denying it. That means they both would certainly have to be lying. And there's an enormous cost to that. Very different from being vague or leaving an "out" when the truth comes out.

But in both Apple's and Amazon's denials they claim to have already done extensive investigations.

There's a cost to damaging your credibility.

The public has a very short memory. It’s surprising how fast the credibility is damaged and repaired.

Don’t put too much emphasis on big Corp and their “credibility”.

and there is an even greater cost to 1) not working collegially with the NatSec agencies to maintain secrecy or plausible deniability on critical matters, and 2) destroying instantly your customers' trust in your ability to maintain their data privately, the immediate result of confirming in full the story.

As mentioned above, 1) these denials can be later parsed and opened up as necessary with significantly less reputational damage, and 2) they contain some interesting specifics that can make them strictly true but quite misleading, e.g., "Apple has never found malicious chips, 'hardware manipulations' or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server" might more accurately read "someone else found these..."

Scary scenario: Apple altered their Warrant Canary in 2014 [1]. I'm looking to see if any of the other companies did the same.

EDIT: Not sure if it's related, but in 2015 Reddit removed it's canary [2].

[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/20/apples_warrant_cana...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4cqyia/for_y...

On the other hand, NYTimes was wrong about WMD in Iraq, and those articles were sourced from numerous anonymous government officials. Turns out, just as in this case, those government officials had an agenda. In 2003, it was starting a pre-emptive war against Iraq, and in 2018, it seems trade wars with China are popular... perhaps we can connect some dots.

How much of an individual user’s data has been compromised? As far as I understand, as long as you’re not using iCloud, you’re pretty well-protected. Is that inaccurate?

Seems odd that national security officials would outright lie about a computer chip being implanted on hardware. Occam's razor tells me Amazon/Apple are trying not to sour ties with their suppliers.

If you’re looking for a motive, how about this administration’s obsession with getting manufacturing jobs “back” to the US? Seems to me that this along with the current trade war, could be part of a strategy to do just that.

Agree. Bloomberg is taking on the two biggest companies in the history of capitalism and China. And they doubled down on their claim after the initial refutations from A&A. So I’m pretty configent they made double extra sure their facts were correct before they published.

The article doesn’t have to be correct, it just has to be well sourced. If it turns out to be incorrect, then it becomes a story about how or why the sources got it wrong.

On the contrary, when the reports concern China, almost none of these media is trustworthy. I’ve been reading those articles in the past, and checking their original source of information or comparing reports/announcements from multipe sources, only to find that those reports are very often full of information from unreliable sources, misunderstanding or plain lies. Even when they report some truths, they can be very selective on the truths to report to reinforce their existing opinions. Reading those reports about China is very like reading Foxnews. I basically stopped reading those now.

Free media is nice, but articles are written by normal people. It’d be silly to trust whatever you can read

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