Bloomberg Misreports on Whatsapp Story

Hmm, I think it could be either, depending on whether leadership viewed the author as incompetent. If leadership viewed the author as incompetent, it's the Dilbert Principle. If leadership viewed the author as competent, it's the Peter Principle.

The latter is what the former originally means :)

I generally believe that the default reaction to a news story should be "it might be true, it might not". The ratio depends on the claim and the evidence. This is an extraordinary claim with mediocre-to-weak evidence, so I'm on the "unlikely to be true" side, but it's hardly an impossible story.

The story is essentially that there was a breakthrough in an effort that everyone in the world is pursuing (hardware supply chain attacks) and then everyone involved behaved as you'd expect them to behave (secretive at first and then defensively once the secret was out). While I don't expect people to believe it, I do expect some evidence if you're going to call it bullshit.

these are the same companies that were "shocked" by the snowden revelations. its not a question of "are these databases less secure than advertised, its a question of to what degree are they less secure than advertised. so i think calling the china access a conspiracy theory is too naive

Nope, that's not actually a rule.

Sometimes reporters can work that transparently, but they can also report stories based on private information, and your only choice is whether to trust that they're telling the truth.

For example, a newspaper will sometimes report things based on anonymous sources. You don't get to know who the sources are. You just have to trust that the newspaper isn't making things up and properly vetted their sources.

Of course, that doesn't mean you immediately start trusting any random reporter or newspaper, but trust is based on track record and reputation, not being transparent about sources in every story.

I'm of the opinion that you need evidence of bullshit if you're going to claim that the reporting organization has lost all credibility. Anonymous sources unwilling to go public is the nature of intelligence community reporting.

If this story is real and sources are made public, people are almost certainly going to jail - some of those sources (if real) had to have security clearances.

I did. I would need a lawyer to better understand what exactly we can extract from those denials, but this is what I can say for sure: all 3 of those companies would be extremely damaged by the public thinking this story is true. AWS considers security to be its single most important job and if the public discourse were to become cloud=supply-chain vulnerability, it would be devastating. This is clearly an existential threat to SuperMicro. I can't say as much about Apple, but from the outside it looks like they believe security/privacy to be one of their core brand strengths. Whether the article is true or false, I would fully expect these companies to minimize the impact of this article to the full extent they are legally able.

I would need a legal opinion to understand if their denials would put them at legal risk were the article to be true (in which case I would be much more inclined to believe their denials) and whether their denials tell us anything about potential government gag orders (if the article is correct about a top-secret investigation, I would imagine they would have legal obligations around what they can say).

I don't want to use false equivalence to make it seem like I believe this article is as likely to be true as not (I think it's unlikely or at least extremely misleading), but everything I can see from my not-so-informed position is consistent with both a true and a false article.