Can anyone show us any code? Or an actual chip? Cool infographics don't cut it for me after the first time around with this.
Speculation: I read last time that Bloomberg rewards the authors of stories that cause stock swings and the last time this came up there was a sizeable swing which had almost returned to normal when this story was released.
They ended that practice well before the previous story was published.
"As long as knowledge has not been attained, the skeptics aim not to affirm anything."
I would ask HN readers if they believe the Snowden leaks about NSA's TAO unit? If so, why so much doubt that other superpowers practice similar operations?
Nobody has been able to verify it, including the journalists who wrote the story.
Nobody doubts that China engages in a broad range of hacking attempts. It's just that this story is entirely unsupported by evidence.
People seem to be reading way too far into looking for a "custom chip" when the actual hack is probably just backdoor-implanted BMC firmware on a generic SPI flash chip.
One is the cited testimony of someone regarding a (large?) batch of Lenovo laptops found to be phoning home in secret, from public court testimony.
The other is the incident with Intel reporting that a modified update package was downloaded from Supermicro's update site and infected a system, causing it to phone home, and both Intel and Supermicro admitted (assuming you believe the journalists aren't making things up out of whole cloth) that something happened resulting in Intel contacting Supermicro to report the incident.
Every software or hardware phone their place of origin naturally. Only authoritarian countries like China would require vendors to host services inside sovereign territory.
No, this is a negative trend. Software and hardware vendors don't need to spy on their users, and many don't.
//https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Edit: now it is obvious to me that these were artistic renditions and not photos of any chip. Disregard the above.
Amazing how the level of evidence required for this is completely different and significantly higher from almost everything else that dominated the news since 2016.