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Ironically, China might have done more to bring back manufacturing to the US than Trump and Obama combined. Regardless of if this is actually true, and so far
by chollida1 8y ago
Ironically, China might have done more to bring back manufacturing to the US than Trump and Obama combined.
Regardless of if this is actually true, and so far that's debatable, clearly the rest of the world needs to retrieve ownership of their supply chains for mission critical computer systems.
It's hard to see how this doesn't embolden Trump to take more action against China. and to be fair at this point, its hard to disagree with him that China is taking advantage of the rest of the world.
Poor Super Micro. There time as a public company is probably measured in months now:(
> Appleboum said that he's consulted with intelligence agencies outside the U.S. that have told him they've been tracking the manipulation of Supermicro hardware, and the hardware of other companies, for some time.
I'd imagine at this point everyone who has the ability to do deep inspection of their hardware is working as fast as possible to resweep their servers.
- jackconnor 8y agoIf Super Micro goes under and we discover this story was massively incorrect, can they sue for the lost market value? If so, this may cost bloomberg billions.
- java-man 8y agoand if it is correct?
- imglorp 8y agoIf it's correct, it's highly likely that most cloud vendors are in the same boat. Imagine Google or AWS, who each have multiple millions of servers: even if they build their own motherboards, there are so many 3rd party components there's no way to vet all the boards. Their IDS will catch some, but not all. One might imagine a cloud vendor is constantly the target from multiple state actors, foreign and domestic, all vying for universal access.
- cm2187 8y agoI can't imagine the cost of x-ray-ing all motherboards on an AWS scale.
- imglorp 8y agoX-ray won't catch substitute chips: they will have the same package and same markings but a few extra functions on their silicon. Good luck eyeballing that one. I think you're right though: they should examine a sample of the boards at lest. In addition--layering defense--one would imagine simply putting a motherboard on a quarantine LAN, simulating their production network, and watching its network traffic for phoning home. The real implants might be waiting for a specific situation, like a date or a string on the bus, so you never really know if you got them all.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoAt that point they might as well just replace them. Which they presumably do every few years regardless.
- jackconnor 8y agoThen they’re screwed, because it was them who messed up and didn’t QA hard enough. We’ll see...
- ElBarto 8y agoFollowing the first story it was reported that Amazon had already ditched Supermicro as a supplier.
- toast0 8y agoGiven Amazon's scale, I would be very surprised if they're not either leveraging Open Compute designs or doing something similar with custom designs similar to open compute. Supermicro makes nice motherboards and servers, but they definitely are addressing general purposes, and something tuned more towards the specific needs of Amazon could be a lot more cost effective; even if that just means getting hardware that runs OpenBMC so the BMC firmware isn't complete trash.
- iscrewyou 8y agoYou know this whole time I’ve been wondering that if this is true, I see some manufacturing coming back to the US. But I completely missed the part where China also makes stuff for the rest of the world and other countries might also be pulling manufacturing back to their home countries. Sometimes it’s just easy to stay focused in. Your comment made me take a step back and look at the bigger picture.