So... were Bloomberg just bare-face lying, then?
This is a very common pattern. American media publishes outlandish stories and the only evidence is "anonymous sources" and highly partisan agents. Iraqi soldiers killed babies in incubators. Iraq has 10_000 aluminum tubes. Iran is arresting all its Jews. China has camps with millions of people imprisoned.
The only thing insane about the whole affair is that no matter how many times it happens, virtually every time, Americans are quick to believe these reports and display virtually no skepticism. The problem isn't Bloomberg by any stretch of the imagination.
This appears to be actually true in Xinyang?
> Iraq aluminium tubes
https://www.ucsusa.org/center-for-science-and-democracy/scie...
It appears that they did try to buy the tubes, and they could be used for nuclear weapons (that's why they were embargoed) - but the evidence did not support that interpretation of their purpose.
A deeper point: journalism considers accurate reporting to be reporting that "X said Y" if X did, in fact, say Y. It does not consider itself bound to independently investigate the truth of that - indeed, attaching the reporters's assessment that the source is lying could be considered bias!
According to what evidence?
The entire story is based off remarks from an anonymous UN official on a random UN committee. [1] In classic style remarks from anonymous and highly partisan sources are repeated endlessly until they "become" true. There's absolutely zero concrete evidence that can be verified.
The deeper point is that Americans are trapped inside a propaganda bubble. Their outlandish understanding of the world is based on nothing more than gossip repeated over and over by their press. It's no better than Russia; the only difference is that most Russians know full well what's going on and are very skeptical of such claims.
On a deeper level I suspect Americans need to believe this nonsense, that there must be an external enemy to hate. It's not that they are deceived by the media, it's that they want to be deceived.
[1] https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/08/23/un-did-not-report-chi...
For a prior incident, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadBIOS
They're a news agency. They claim to have 13 sources. If they found them to be credible, they wouldn't be lying by publishing this. Just wrong.
If Apple found no signs of hacking only tells us that their SIEM isn't good enough.
This spy stuff is Inception IRL.
[0] "Bloomberg News Pays Reporters More If Their Stories Move Markets" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18162440
This story has been out less than 72 hours? Most of them over a weekend.
Let's let the researchers get back to work today and start actually looking for physical evidence.
Personally, I'm MORE worried with all the denials rather than less.
If there was nothing to the story, I would expect Apple to say "We don't know anything about this" and then simply ignore the ongoing kerfuffle--especially on a weekend.
The fact that they seem to be in full on PR mode at the highest levels on a weekend is somewhat worrying.
What else would you expect them to do ?
From what I've read such attack would be possible, and I think that if it happened no-one would acknowledge it. This allegedly happened 3 years ago so no-one is going to find physical evidence anyway.
They key is that it would be possible so the important thing here is for everyone to take appropriate defensive measures.
This is not a case of competing claims. Believing that publicly traded companies would vehemently lie instead of keeping silence or use weasel words is essentially preferring conspiracy theories.
Presenting such a case without hard, verifiable evidence is ludicrous and only works because many people are susceptible for a bad company/bad government conspiracy narrative.
This allegedly happened 3 years ago so there aren't going to be any physical evidence anyway and everyone knows it.
You know that shareholders can sue the company if they lie publicly? That is the reason why they usually keep silent or use weasel words.
Why would anyone sue Apple over this? If anything a lie would help the company as acknowledging a hack would hit the share price.
Nothing will happen, no-one is going to prove or disprove anything, and this will quietly be forgotten.
As I mentioned, the proof lies with the accuser. See
"Presenting such a case without hard, verifiable evidence is ludicrous and only works because many people are susceptible for a bad company/bad government conspiracy narrative."
If you think this is a he said/she said case, then you are deep into conspiracy territory.
They compromised RSA, remember that?
They wiretapped everybody, remember that?
They stole internal corporate communications, remember that?
And, in all cases, the NSA was doing things far worse than the tech folks even imagined. And, in all cases, there were denials all around. Until there weren't.
So, one one side we have Bloomberg: a company who makes a living digging up market moving information. A company whose bottom line is going to be affected by this. A company who will be on the receiving end of no end of lawsuits if they are wrong.
On another side, we have the NSA, the PLA, the KGB, etc., all of whom are known to be malicious actors who would all do exactly what was described.
And, on another side, we have a whole bunch of rich companies that stand to lose quite a lot if it comes out that they were significantly compromised, or, worse, actually cooperated with any of the above entities.
I think my Bayesian priors are quite well calibrated, thanks.
After a few weeks, if we still don't have physical evidence in hand, I'll update my priors.
Is telling partial truth lying?
By combining multiple truth as one fabricated piece, is it lying?
Are we in kindergarten? Off course it is lying.
If I repeat a lie that I’m told, I’m merely being a dupe.
And Luke says "we did and and it passed" knowing full well that Chewbacca marked some tests with #[ignore] annotation and one of those ignored tests covers the exact functionality that is now failing in production.
I call telling partial truth intellectual dishonesty and for all practical purposes it is indistinguishable from lying.