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apeace

Is the following a possible explanation?

* Random Apple engineer finds the implant.

* Goes directly to FBI without telling boss at Apple.

* FBI gags the engineer, says "Do not even tell your boss about this, it's national security and we're handling it".

* Bloomberg catches wind of this (maybe the same engineer leaks to them?), publishes their story.

* Engineer is now freaked, goes back to FBI and says "Are you really sure I shouldn't tell by boss?" and they say "Yes, we're sure, you are legally bound to secrecy".

I don't know how security teams, the FBI, or national security work. But that's the only scenario that comes to my mind which would explain both sides being completely sure of their version of the story.

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> Goes directly to FBI without telling boss at Apple.

This is really hard to believe. An engineer who found this bug at Apple would most likely be praised for finding it. It is a huge discovery. What motivation would he have to not tell his manager?

Not only that, but also when thinking about the process of discovering an issue this big, I doubt a single engineer or team would have identified it on their own. Designing servers is a big undertaking and this part would only be identified as malicious in a couple of ways.

If some engineer finds a part on the board that is not in the BOM, I doubt their first thought would be to report it to the FBI. There would likely be some long email thread bouncing around multiple teams trying to determine if some design change was missed.

> would most likely be praised for finding it. It is a huge discovery.

Seriously, history, recent and otherwise, is littered w/the ghosts and carcasses of employees who were anything but rewarded for identifying problems great and small.

Oftentimes the safest thing to do is to pretend that one saw/heard/knows nothing while hoping that someone else has the steel to sound the alarm.

And for this sort of situation, there's too much at stake and are too many known and unknown stakeholders involved to blindly believe that this would be an exception to what I wrote above.

On a separate but related note, for those playing the "conspiracy theory" game: - On October 4th, Bloomberg releases The Big Hack story; and - On the same day, VP Pence gives a speech at the Hudson Institute about...? China being a bad actor which indulges in all sorts of behavior (that the United States would never ever engage in or condone).[1]

Factor in the "trade war" and long-ongoing attempts to 'encourage' companies to rethink their supply chains/ relocate production...

[1] https://www.hudson.org/events/1610-vice-president-mike-pence...

Hmm... flags and more down-votes, but still no counterarguments or questions. (Dang, what's up with that?)

Anyway, here's a September article from Axios entitled, "The Trump administration's secret anti-China plans" https://www.axios.com/trump-administration-anti-china-campai...

From the article: "The broadside against China — which is planned to be both rhetorical and substantive — will be "administration-wide,"" [emphasis added] ""The push is coming from the national security apparatus," the source added."

Personally, I hope no products are compromised, ever. That's probably not the case, and either way, the average person won't care much in the short term. Busy w/other stuff, they probably don't remember this story today, if they even heard about it. Businessweek is, after all, a business magazine targeted at a pretty specific audience.

As for whether Bloomberg's story is part of a wider campaign, I don't know and don't believe I've said otherwise. It doesn't really matter to me, as I know that a game is on and that it isn't unreasonable to use such a story while playing. I've seen and heard all sorts of curious things in the last few years. Nothing about today's environment tells me that I'll have fewer such occurrences.

Toodles, kids.

It wouldn't be one engineer. Bloomberg says that they have three senior sources inside Apple.

What does "senior" mean? In the tech industry efveryone with 2yrs experience is "senior", and everyone on salary is an "executive"

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