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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

All my knowledge about this has come from Media articles Covering the dangers of using huawei tech, but I haven’t seen anything that describes Chinese attacks using huawei equipment. We do know the long history of China sponsored hacking and it’s not a leap to go so far as to think Huawei could be compelled to backdoor equipment. For that reason not using Huawei is safer for national security one way or the other.

However, on Capitol Hill, I think the idea is more to harm China than protect. I remember that the Washington metro trains were almost blocked because they are built by a Chinese company. Someone in congress dreamed up a Tom Clancy plot where the Chinese could bring down Washington by hijacking their transit system.

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Just about every data center in the US has a decent percent of its servers running as nodes of botnets for entities inside of China, not to mention the hundreds of millions of "smart" devices. That leaves out of the equation TickTock and Reddit and every other above-board Chinese communist party partly owned tech in the US.

Assuming that you know what your exact attack surface is is a pretty clear sign that you are very vulnerable to attack.

That one time tiny chips in AWS servers Elemental/Supermicro/Apple 2018

Too bad that nobody ever managed to find any of those tiny super spy chips, even three years later.

But hey: The poop was thrown, some of it stuck, and now you are repeating it as established fact, when even the sources named in the Bloomberg piece found it quite lacking after publication [0]

So the narrative successfully did it's FUD job, and here we are under a post about yet another Bloomberg headline that nobody even questions in the slightest.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/09/bloomberg/

> Too bad that nobody ever managed to find any of those tiny super spy chips, even three years later.

I wonder if some data center workers received a list of serial numbers that had to fail in the next few days and get decommissioned.

Maybe the request came from the same people operating exit checks in the worker's home country.

There's no way of knowing.

> I wonder if some data center workers received a list of serial numbers that had to fail in the next few days and get decommissioned.

We are talking about dozens of data centers here, thousands of server racks, across half a dozen different companies and geographically spread pretty much all over the US.

Pulling that off would require a massive conspiracy involving hundreds of people, in addition to China being able to manufacture magic super tech that's even too advanced for the US.

> There's no way of knowing.

Sure there is a way of knowing: Show such a server board with such a super spy chip. But as long as we lack such extraordinary evidence such extraordinary claims should be taken with a massive grain of salt and not given the benefit of the doubt.

Particularly when they come out of a government/industrial complex that has a rich history of lying and making up stuff to serve their particular foreign policy narrative.

Well good discussion on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328

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