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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Sure, completely unthinkable that the NSA and big companies are attempting to cover up a story of hacking and surveillance. <rolls eyes>

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.

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Apple is trying to position itself as the only major tech company that keeps your data private, and this story threatens to undermine that story. So no surprise the PR department is full at work.

What else would you expect them to do ?

One thing I learned from this Bloomberg story is, that the human mind seems hardwired to prefer conspiracy theories over facts and is very bad at taking probabilities in account.

It's not the human mind, it's a particular ideology. What's at work here is an ideology that must find enemies, the more heinous the better, in order to justify its own heinous actions.

We don't have facts here, just competing claims.

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.

> We don't have facts here, just competing claims.

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.

Believing that publicly traded companies would not lie is rather naive.

This allegedly happened 3 years ago so there aren't going to be any physical evidence anyway and everyone knows it.

> Believing that publicly traded companies would not lie is rather naive.

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.

As mentioned, how are you going to prove who's lying?

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 mentioned, how are you going to prove who's lying?

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.

That's not a reply...

This is a boat entirely of the NSA's making.

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.

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