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Comment by niutech | Hacker News Reader

> "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it"

That's whitewashing. If they license the brand, they should control every aspect of manufacturing. Otherwise they are irresponsible. If I was their client, I wouldn't trust them any longer and return all pagers.

I am curious about the technical details - where were the explosives packed, how were they connected and triggered? Did any pager survive and didn't blow up?

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Unfortunately I’ve been trying to tell this to friends and family for almost a decade in regards to clothing and home goods.

People are stuck in the 80s and 90s that a logo defines how something was made, which isn’t true at all these days. Calvin Klein is a great example where most of their income comes from licensing, not selling their own clothes. They might review designs but have no say on if the resulting garment can be sold with their logo. As long as they get get the licensing fee. Unfortunately I know people who will spend more on their items than the same garment made by the same manufacturer but with a different license on jt

Same for Toshiba TVs and many others

Working at an electronics retailer a few years ago, this was well-known (though news to me, when I started). They hid the fact that the company no longer manufactured their products, and/or that multiple companies were selling similar or even the same product (produced in the same factory, even).

It is trouble, though, since the entire point of a "brand" is to signal provenance in manufacturing, quality, etc. It's supposed to be a way to know something about the product (if nothing else, who to hold accountable when something goes wrong). If it doesn't, what's the point?

These declarations sound so stupid to me. What's the point of having your brand on a product, if you're going to claim you have nothing to do with it? What is the point of the concept of a brand even?

Possibly the pagers had to have a popular brand to "work as designed", and this brand was up for sale, but declares it won't admit this to the real customers.

I guess with QR-Code Menus, Smartphones replacing their tech almost everywhere, Starlink etc. they where happy to take any revenue.

Brands died as anything reliable from the consumer perspective when the Chinese bought all the dying brands in the 2000s.

The only cheap goods with maintained brands are things like McDonald's which have recurring relationship with consumers.

Even if brands have died, companies admitting it is somewhat novel.

To make money, like with all the merchandising that happens with a popular movie. Any number of things are licensed with the owner of the IP having very limited involvement in it, like turning down certain types of licenses as bad for the brand but not getting into the weeds of manufacturing. It's not like if there was some branded Disney cell phone that Disney is going to inspect all the board-level components. I can't speak about this pager company other than to think they're glad for any business they could get, so would license the brand.

There must be some other ostensible purpose for a brand than "to make money". People who would buy the hypothetical Disney phone would have other reasons than "to give Disney money". Nobody has that as a goal when buying stuff.

The goal of the brand owners is to make money, for the customer the value should be a certain reputation of quality. But as long as customers don’t notice or punish it, it’s advantageous to sell out your brand to make more money (from the perspective of the brand owner)

And isn't it strange when a company publicly declares that you can't have any expectations based on their brand? Seems like they're drawing customers' attention to the thing, instead of hoping they don't notice.

People form subconscious connections to a brand. You are more likely to buy a Disney phone for your kid if it gives you a warm feeling because you remember how much fun it was to watch Lion King with your kid. That might not be the deciding factor, but if it's functionally identical to the other other phones it might make the difference.

Yeah, but I don't think the subconscious factor is strong in the case of some pagers sold to Hezbollah. Disney was an example someone chose, and it ceases to be a useful example here.

To prepare for lawsuits from families of the injured in what appears to be a supply chain attack maybe without the knowledge of their licensee in Budapest (BAC Consulting), and likely without their (Gold Apollo) knowledge. Deny and distance.

You can judge them to be not a generally super-trustworthy brand.

But I would grant them that their responsibility for the deaths of these people is limited.

Few civilian brands would survive the scrutiny if every product they put their stickers on were required to be Mossad-proof.

I feel like it’s reasonable to expect a brand to be aware if some organization, even Mossad, placed explosives in 5000 of their items.

It means this company is incompetent and should not be trusted. It’s one thing to have malware injected into software (pretty bad) and another to have physical explosives put into your product.

So if someone steals a box of iphones, adds a few grams of explosives inside each phone, and then resells them or gives them away, then Apple is at fault?

If you buy the boxes from an Apple store, or from an approved distributor, Apple is at fault. What's the meaning of "approved"?

If you buy them from the back of a truck, then no, Apple has no fault of course.

But there's a declaration saying "we had nothing to do with the pagers even though they have our brand". That's different from saying "they were booby-trapped after they left our hands". Not even the company itself is claiming the defense you're using.

The problem is that the company which did the rigging seems to have had an official license. If apple gave away licenses to build things branded apple and they contained explosives, I would blame apple, too.

Aware, of course, they're aware of it now.

But the best that they can realistically do, once they've found out about the shenanigans, is to cancel the licensing deal with the Hungarian manufacturer. Which they probably will. Maybe sue them in a Hungarian court, if there's anybody left to sue.

Every brand in the world is now expected to have the ability to detect and thwart intelligence operations run by Mossad? Like, a yoghurt company needs to have a counter intelligence division?

I think they should have some control over their manufacturing. It’s not so much that the yogurt company has a counter intelligence division, it’s that the yogurt company didn’t detect someone putting poison into a few hundred truckloads.

I expect brands to have quality control procedures in place.

Selling your own parts to be restamped as another brand is common though. Selling your brand to be stamped on someone else's parts is basically only useful to do this exact thing though.

Why would you say that? Many everyday products are produced under license or franchise with the brand having minimal involvement in the entire process. Even if apollo had done qc in the factory it would be easy to trick them.

Manufacturers for certain categories of products are homogenized, often regionally, whereas the brands maybe many.

Plus, clandestine supply chain attacks fall into 2 categories:

- A. With manufacturer/reseller complicity. (Not many manufacturers choose this because it would harm their business.)

- B. Without manufacturer/reseller complicity, but with logistics interception for sw/hw implants or complete substitution. (This is the method NSA TAO used to load implants into Cisco gear.)

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