My trust of bloomberg has been pretty low since the spy chip story, that seems to have been just a hoax. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly hard to verify and/or defend against.
I say plausible as we know that US intelligence agencies have conducted similar actions:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
And that's without even direct access to the manufacturing floor (as in the Supermicro case).
I haven't read a single bloomberg article since they published that story. Journalistic integrity is very important to me.
(Emphasis on plausibly, which is not the same as probably.)
A hoax implies they made it up. Instead they have multiple sources giving similar stories, in an area that is shrouded in secrecy of both the corporate and national security kind.
It's hard to report in this area: people can't and won't go on the record, motivations can be murky and very technical details are extremely important.
However, the parts that can be verified are easily verifiable, the technical details seem realistic and the motivations align.
It's possible that the story is wrong, but hoax seems to be the wrong way to think about this.
Because in the US, truth is an absolute defense to the defamation torts. (The same is not truth in the UK; you can still be liable for defamation even if everything you said is true. See, e.g., the case of the Nazi-fetishist MP.)
The Streisand effect is not a thing companies worry about. Because more brand damage = more monetary damages to collect.
It's entirely reasonable for a company to decide that it's not worth the investment and not pursue.
And to refer back to this article, it's the French AMF fined Bloomberg, Vinci only had to file a complaint, not a full lawsuit with teams of lawyers.
Besides, I’m sure SuperMicro just wants it to blow over and be done with it. Being in the news for a lawsuit will bring it up again and possibly harm them financially as people (managers who order) who don’t understand things have knee jerk reactions.