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Comment by llmfan | Hacker News Reader

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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