Do you remember the Bloomberg article about Big China Chip Hack? About Apple was been refuted, debunked, and ridiculed. See https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...
On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.
This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article.
Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn't get anything because people didn't turn on him due to the accusation, they turned on Elon.
If it's not believed then you couldn't have suffered harm.
So you don't believe it, you believe another story. Bloomberg didn't say "this is possible" they said "this is happening and here are the exact details".
> obvious plausibility
> assume
As I see it you don't actually believe that particular story, you believe something "like that" is plausible. So in other words Bloomberg wrote some plausible fiction. Nobody is saying something like that isn't possible, just that if we wanted to read fiction Bloomberg wouldn't be the place to look for it.
Given the string of high profile misreporting and failures to substantiate their claims one would have to be very gullible to still take Bloomberg reporting at face value without being presented with some hard proof and 3rd party confirmation.
I agree it’s all very odd. I wonder if we’ll ever get the story behind the story.
I suppose it has other uses too, like making Michael Bloomberg look good.
What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower.
I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.
If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement?
> On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story
Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other.
Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.
So where is the retraction or followup reporting? Do they still believe it to be true? That's interesting in itself, is it not?
Second, at least some of the claimed sources were not anonymous and were interviewed later by others (there were a few HN threads back them some weeks after the initial story) and they explicitly disclaimed that they have confirmed the case, but rather that all they have told Bloomberg is essentially "something like this might be theoretically possible, sure, but the current evidence doesn't suggest that this has happened" - so we have some evidence that these Bloomberg journalists "attempted" to corroborate multiple sources which did not confirm the story that they wanted to tell, but they went ahead with the story anyway.
It's Bloomberg, my dudes. That news source is the lowest quality trusted news source. I like that they can stay in business though. Made a neat 30+% on SMCI easy peasy. And that requires people like you to trust Bloomberg so that's good.
It was refuted, yes, but every company always does that, right up until they admit in a court settlement that the allegations were true all along. Despite the supposedly slanderous statements, none of the supposedly slandered companies has sued over the article, even though in several cases they suffered material impacts to their stock prices and financial results.
...But nothing.
Despite supposedly defamatory statements, nothing was done by any of the companies mentioned in the article.
Comments here have mention the Streisand effect as the reason for inaction, but the Streisand effect does not apply to defamation. The concept behind the Streisand effect is that efforts to censor information just result in greater dissemination. However, in a defamation lawsuit with potentially billions of dollars of damages at stake, you want greater dissemination of the defamatory statements, because that increases the payout at the end of the road. And because with enough money you can recover from the negative PR (see, e.g, Tylenol, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, BP, etc.).
I don't think there's much of any "evidence" to prove it and a hack like that is pretty.
Then again nobody ... did anything after that either and everyone responded kinda awkwardly about it.
I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks?
I think about the kind of info we only get when lawsuits happen, and here the suing party could be losing more in collateral damage for just punishing a petty journal ?
Sure. What if the boards were hacked, but not by the Chinese? What if some company insiders knew? Just wildly speculating, but the response at the time seemed odd to me.
The silence following that whole debacle is deafening and probably very telling...
Both Olson and Bloomberg had bad judgment here. A political appointee should not have made sarcastically anti-anti-Semitic statements, because he should have had the brainpower to know that in the Trump administration such statements would be taken at face value. And Bloomberg probably should have revised the article to add a paragraph about how a Trump appointee's anti-Semitic statements were actually anti-anti-Semitic in light of additional context that wasn't in the posts at the time they were made.
You forgot the part where the reporter deliberately cut off the part of the post that referred to the comment as satire.