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> Today’s bombshell Bloomberg story has the internet split: either the story is right, and reporters have uncovered one of the largest and jarring breaches of t

> Today’s bombshell Bloomberg story has the internet split: either the story is right, and reporters have uncovered one of the largest and jarring breaches of the U.S. tech industry by a foreign adversary… or it’s not, and a lot of people screwed up. Imagine reading this after the Snowden leaks: Today’s bombshell Guardian story has the internet split: either the story is right, and the biggest Silicon Valley companies are giving the NSA access to their data… or it’s not, and a lot of people screwed up.

lmm 8y ago
The Guardian is an established newspaper with a firm commitment to (what it sees as) the truth, and has a top-flight internal technical team which gives them credibility on this kind of topic. (Interestingly we did see an internet split after the Guardian reported vulnerabilities in WhatsApp's security, but at least in that case there was no dispute on the facts, only their interpretation). Bloomberg is an upstart with an awkward funding model which has already faced serious, credible allegations of political interference and a lack of journalistic integrity (a major investigative story about corruption in China was allegedly spiked at a late stage by management for business reasons).
- techsupporter 8y ago
  Are we meaning the same Bloomberg News? Hasn’t it been around, at least for business news, since about 1990? If so, that seems to me to be well past the upstart stage. But maybe they rebranded or reformed and have no relation to the other name?
  - lmm 8y ago
    I perceive them as an upstart in traditional-journalism terms, certainly compared to a newspaper that was founded in 1821.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      So they're lying because they've only been around for 30 years? What sort of logic is that.
      - lmm 8y ago
        They don't have the same level of history and reputation that the Guardian does. So people don't trust them as much as the Guardian. Which seems fair and reasonable.
- ddeck 8y ago
  I wouldn't call them an upstart. They've been around for 23 years and produce some impressive content, but you are correct regarding the story about the families of the Chinese leaders and potential conflict of interest given Bloomberg L.P.'s business. After the Xi story appeared, terminal sales in China slowed because government officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. The Bloomberg News website was also blocked on Chinese servers, and the company was unable to get visas for journalists it wanted to send to China. In 2014, Grauer told staff at the Bloomberg Hong Kong bureau that the company's sales team had done a "heroic job" of mending relations with Chinese officials who had indicated their displeasure about publication of the Xi revelations. He also warned that if Bloomberg "were to do anything like" the Xi story again, the company would "be straight back in the shit-box." On October 29, 2013, during a conference call, Winkler told four Bloomberg journalists in Hong Kong that the findings of their major investigation into "the hidden financial ties between one of the wealthiest men in China and the families of top Chinese leaders" would not be published. Less than a week later, a second planned article "about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks," was also killed, according to Bloomberg employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News#China_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News#China_coverage
xevb3k 8y ago
Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence. The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has other aspects that are very unlikely. It has also been denied far more strongly than the Snowden leaks were. The biggest problem is really why would you do this? Either the report is wrong in significant ways, or it’s not true at all. The chip they show in the article, is a ceramic package which it would be really hard to embed a semiconductor in (because of the temperatures required to fire the ceramic). It looks like it probably would sit on an alternate footprint for the BCM flash. A ceramic part like that (which they say is for signal conditioning) doesn’t belong at that location anyway. If your going to develop some weird SMD capacitor sized package for a microcontroller... why not just develop a new BCM serial flash chip embedding the same functionally? At least that way the boards would look visually similar. So much just doesn’t make sense to me.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  The Snowden leaks were denied plenty by the companies involved. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
  - xevb3k 8y ago
    And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect? My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      And what about Amazon and Apple's denial will be found technically incorrect in a few years. EDIT: to the downvoters, its easy to play this game, Apple makes a large amount of very specific denials. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. What about investigations and law enforcement contacts via a third party (perhaps a specialized hardware security firm? ) Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. You mean the story they explicitly denied with similar strength (and wiggle room to boot when the truth came out) Apple is deeply committed to protecting the privacy and security of our customers and the data we store. We are constantly monitoring for any attacks on our systems, working closely with vendors and regularly checking equipment for malware. We’re not aware of any data being transmitted to an unauthorized party nor was any infected firmware found on the servers purchased from this vendor. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple-axed-supermicro-servers-from-datacenters-because-of-bad-firmware-update/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple...
Salamat 8y ago
It is shoddy journalism, or rather propaganda when anonymous is really a CIA/MOSSAD etc, as is the case with Bloomberg et al.
draw_down 8y ago
Sure... or you could compare it to a story where the reporter was wrong. It’s not clear what the case is at the moment.
e12e 8y ago
Actually, there was a storm of denial and attacks on snowden's character in main stream media after the leaks ("high school drop out", "low level contractor" etc).

lmm 8y ago

The Guardian is an established newspaper with a firm commitment to (what it sees as) the truth, and has a top-flight internal technical team which gives them credibility on this kind of topic. (Interestingly we did see an internet split after the Guardian reported vulnerabilities in WhatsApp's security, but at least in that case there was no dispute on the facts, only their interpretation). Bloomberg is an upstart with an awkward funding model which has already faced serious, credible allegations of political interference and a lack of journalistic integrity (a major investigative story about corruption in China was allegedly spiked at a late stage by management for business reasons).

techsupporter 8y ago
Are we meaning the same Bloomberg News? Hasn’t it been around, at least for business news, since about 1990? If so, that seems to me to be well past the upstart stage. But maybe they rebranded or reformed and have no relation to the other name?
- lmm 8y ago
  I perceive them as an upstart in traditional-journalism terms, certainly compared to a newspaper that was founded in 1821.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    So they're lying because they've only been around for 30 years? What sort of logic is that.
    - lmm 8y ago
      They don't have the same level of history and reputation that the Guardian does. So people don't trust them as much as the Guardian. Which seems fair and reasonable.
ddeck 8y ago
I wouldn't call them an upstart. They've been around for 23 years and produce some impressive content, but you are correct regarding the story about the families of the Chinese leaders and potential conflict of interest given Bloomberg L.P.'s business. After the Xi story appeared, terminal sales in China slowed because government officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. The Bloomberg News website was also blocked on Chinese servers, and the company was unable to get visas for journalists it wanted to send to China. In 2014, Grauer told staff at the Bloomberg Hong Kong bureau that the company's sales team had done a "heroic job" of mending relations with Chinese officials who had indicated their displeasure about publication of the Xi revelations. He also warned that if Bloomberg "were to do anything like" the Xi story again, the company would "be straight back in the shit-box." On October 29, 2013, during a conference call, Winkler told four Bloomberg journalists in Hong Kong that the findings of their major investigation into "the hidden financial ties between one of the wealthiest men in China and the families of top Chinese leaders" would not be published. Less than a week later, a second planned article "about the children of senior Chinese officials employed by foreign banks," was also killed, according to Bloomberg employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News#China_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_News#China_coverage

xevb3k 8y ago

Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence. The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has other aspects that are very unlikely. It has also been denied far more strongly than the Snowden leaks were. The biggest problem is really why would you do this? Either the report is wrong in significant ways, or it’s not true at all. The chip they show in the article, is a ceramic package which it would be really hard to embed a semiconductor in (because of the temperatures required to fire the ceramic). It looks like it probably would sit on an alternate footprint for the BCM flash. A ceramic part like that (which they say is for signal conditioning) doesn’t belong at that location anyway. If your going to develop some weird SMD capacitor sized package for a microcontroller... why not just develop a new BCM serial flash chip embedding the same functionally? At least that way the boards would look visually similar. So much just doesn’t make sense to me.

throwaway2048 8y ago
The Snowden leaks were denied plenty by the companies involved. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
- xevb3k 8y ago
  And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect? My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    And what about Amazon and Apple's denial will be found technically incorrect in a few years. EDIT: to the downvoters, its easy to play this game, Apple makes a large amount of very specific denials. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. What about investigations and law enforcement contacts via a third party (perhaps a specialized hardware security firm? ) Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. You mean the story they explicitly denied with similar strength (and wiggle room to boot when the truth came out) Apple is deeply committed to protecting the privacy and security of our customers and the data we store. We are constantly monitoring for any attacks on our systems, working closely with vendors and regularly checking equipment for malware. We’re not aware of any data being transmitted to an unauthorized party nor was any infected firmware found on the servers purchased from this vendor. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple-axed-supermicro-servers-from-datacenters-because-of-bad-firmware-update/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple...

Salamat 8y ago

It is shoddy journalism, or rather propaganda when anonymous is really a CIA/MOSSAD etc, as is the case with Bloomberg et al.

draw_down 8y ago

Sure... or you could compare it to a story where the reporter was wrong. It’s not clear what the case is at the moment.

e12e 8y ago

Actually, there was a storm of denial and attacks on snowden's character in main stream media after the leaks ("high school drop out", "low level contractor" etc).