Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkades | Hacker News Reader

Hey, did Bloomberg ever retract its entirely unverified Chinese spy chip story?

Just a reminder that they’ve blown all their credibility.

You may not be aware of the great talk titled "Modchips of the State" [1] (presented at 35C3 in Dec 2018).

The speaker managed to reproduce the exact single-chip hardware implant attack suggested in the Oct 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek story [2] [3], which claimed Amazon and Apple found malicious hardware implants in Supermicro motherboards while conducting detailed inspections.

While Bloomberg has never retracted the story, there's an argument that the sources have vested interests in lying to Bloomberg suggesting that attacks developed in lab-conditions actually occurred in the real-world, in order to raise awareness of supply-chain risks (something the current US administration has been attempting to do for some time). There's also a suggestion that the journalist was acting in good-faith but mixed up a few different attacks, with the sources reluctant to clarify things. Another suggestion is that the attack did happen, and Amazon and Apple were forced to issue denials.

It's a very fascinating story. Maybe I'm naive, but if Bloomberg was in-fact wrong, they would issue a correction or a retraction. The fact they haven't retracted it suggests to me that there's truth to the story.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7H3V7tkxeA

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJGbcjfJ7rU

The fact Supermicro didn’t sue kind of says it all to me.

Indeed.

Be that as it may, this is a report of a filed lawsuit. It's a lot harder to get the fact that a lawsuit was filed wrong, as it's trivial to verify. They even listed the docket number.

There’s “reporting the facts,” and then there’s all the context and background work that constitute the journalism bit. One can do the former and still fail utterly at the latter.

And there's more than one journalist and editor at Bloomberg, and people excel at different things. Even WCCFTech gets leaks right once in a while.

There's really only one sentence that even addresses the context and background with respect to China in this blurb, and that's this one:

"The lawsuit marks the latest accusation from an American firm of intellectual property theft by Chinese companies, a perennial sore point that’s helped escalate tensions between the world’s two largest economies."

Seems pretty fair to me. You'd be hard pressed to say that that's inaccurate or misleading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com