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Also, almost everyone who lies thinks they'll get away with it. Otherwise, why lie? Maybe AWS and Apple are counting on the top-secret nature of all this to e

by 394549 8y ago

Also, almost everyone who lies thinks they'll get away with it. Otherwise, why lie? Maybe AWS and Apple are counting on the top-secret nature of all this to enable their lies. Would US intelligence agencies really come out on the record to contradict the denials and confirm the hack if it meant destroying the credibility of a couple of American companies? The Bloomberg article detailed how the government was not willing to sound the same alarms against an American company as they were against Huawei and ZTE for just that reason. I'm guessing that creates enough ambiguity for false denials to be effective.

morpheuskafka 8y ago
Yeah I think people don’t understand how big of a deal this would be. Remember Joseph McCarthy? Now picture that, in today’s politics, only with even a shred of real evidence that US companies and the military were infiltrated. That’s an act of war between two nuclear powers. There is literally no telling what kind of chaos could follow. I’m not saying it’s guranteed that this story is good—-for one, I find the glossed over technical details a little questionable. But it is definitely plausible that this is a false denial, under orders or not. Regardless, two points are very clear. Remember Stallman who uses that old X60 with a free BIOS? We all called him crazy when he insisted on not having management firmwares and secretive back doors. Now we have a story claiming they were used in an attack by a US adversary (as well as a long chain of confirmed recent security flaws). The second point is that we have to stop trusting China as the sole source for all electronics. It’s a national security crisis that there isn’t a single US facility making many of the components needed for basic computing platform. The federal government needs to immediately and strongly incentive more domestic foundries. And not the trump style “here be factory, jobs good” but actual targeted planning to bring the whole supply chain back, not just the final assembly everyone talks about.

by 394549 8y ago

morpheuskafka 8y ago

Yeah I think people don’t understand how big of a deal this would be. Remember Joseph McCarthy? Now picture that, in today’s politics, only with even a shred of real evidence that US companies and the military were infiltrated. That’s an act of war between two nuclear powers. There is literally no telling what kind of chaos could follow. I’m not saying it’s guranteed that this story is good—-for one, I find the glossed over technical details a little questionable. But it is definitely plausible that this is a false denial, under orders or not. Regardless, two points are very clear. Remember Stallman who uses that old X60 with a free BIOS? We all called him crazy when he insisted on not having management firmwares and secretive back doors. Now we have a story claiming they were used in an attack by a US adversary (as well as a long chain of confirmed recent security flaws). The second point is that we have to stop trusting China as the sole source for all electronics. It’s a national security crisis that there isn’t a single US facility making many of the components needed for basic computing platform. The federal government needs to immediately and strongly incentive more domestic foundries. And not the trump style “here be factory, jobs good” but actual targeted planning to bring the whole supply chain back, not just the final assembly everyone talks about.