7 ms·

Do you remember the Bloomberg article about Big China Chip Hack? About Apple was been refuted, debunked, and ridiculed. See https://appleinsider.com/articles/19

by fbn79 7y ago

Do you remember the Bloomberg article about Big China Chip Hack? About Apple was been refuted, debunked, and ridiculed. See https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-later-bloomberg-silently-stands-by-its-big-hack-icloud-spy-chip-story https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/04/editorial-a-year-...

aguyfromnb 7y ago
This story is so odd to me. On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  >It just kinda...disappeared. This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article. Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn't get anything because people didn't turn on him due to the accusation, they turned on Elon. If it's not believed then you couldn't have suffered harm.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    Super Micro's stock dropped about 30% and took months to recover.
    - privateprofile 7y ago
      And was there any legal action from Super Micro or other affected parties, like in this case?
    - r00fus 7y ago
      I wonder if there were fraudulent stock transactions during that period (ie, not insider trading but stock manipulation).
  - Lammy 7y ago
    I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story with the lack of proof, but considering how such an attack is within the realm of possibility it seems foolish to not assume the handful of the most powerful and well-funded groups on Earth are doing such a thing. I’m not going to leave my door unlocked at night, for example, until my neighbor gets robbed and proves to me that is possible.
    - close04 7y ago
      > I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story So you don't believe it, you believe another story. Bloomberg didn't say "this is possible" they said "this is happening and here are the exact details".
      - Lammy 7y ago
        I believe it is happening, yes. The obvious plausibility and the way I’ve seen other state-sponsored things (any state) hushed up means the only reasonable thing for me to do is assume the story is based on truth even if the picture isn’t 100% complete. To put it another way, I believe the Bloomberg story is the “Room 641A” to a Snowden-level expose we may never get.
        close04 7y ago
        > I believe it is happening, yes > obvious plausibility > assume As I see it you don't actually believe that particular story, you believe something "like that" is plausible. So in other words Bloomberg wrote some plausible fiction. Nobody is saying something like that isn't possible, just that if we wanted to read fiction Bloomberg wouldn't be the place to look for it. Given the string of high profile misreporting and failures to substantiate their claims one would have to be very gullible to still take Bloomberg reporting at face value without being presented with some hard proof and 3rd party confirmation.
- elliekelly 7y ago
  And Bloomberg never retracted it. It’s still up on their site. Not even an editors note acknowledging the criticism. I agree it’s all very odd. I wonder if we’ll ever get the story behind the story.
  - akvadrako 7y ago
    There is nothing secret. Bloomberg pays reporters to move markets, not to tell facts. This one moved markets, so it was a good story. I suppose it has other uses too, like making Michael Bloomberg look good.
- MertsA 7y ago
  >why didn't anybody sue them? What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it. I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower. I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement? > On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other. Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.
  - aguyfromnb 7y ago
    >If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest. So where is the retraction or followup reporting? Do they still believe it to be true? That's interesting in itself, is it not?
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    It's kind of not the case here. First, they're not required to take any claims at face value, they can (and would be expected to) verify if they're actually true by looking at the evidence their sources provide - and if there's no evidence, then they'd be expected to note that it's all speculation. Second, at least some of the claimed sources were not anonymous and were interviewed later by others (there were a few HN threads back them some weeks after the initial story) and they explicitly disclaimed that they have confirmed the case, but rather that all they have told Bloomberg is essentially "something like this might be theoretically possible, sure, but the current evidence doesn't suggest that this has happened" - so we have some evidence that these Bloomberg journalists "attempted" to corroborate multiple sources which did not confirm the story that they wanted to tell, but they went ahead with the story anyway.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Buy it from a data center sale? We nuked our drives and sold the rest to a liquidation company when we moved to GCP. It's trivial to pick these up. It's Bloomberg, my dudes. That news source is the lowest quality trusted news source. I like that they can stay in business though. Made a neat 30+% on SMCI easy peasy. And that requires people like you to trust Bloomberg so that's good.
adolph 7y ago
And Leif Olson https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/bloomberg-law-retracts-story-labor-department-appointee-leif-olson/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/bloomberg...
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Bad example. All of the allegations in the Bloomberg article were true. Leif Olson actually did all of the things alleged, however the Bloomberg article missed that he supposedly did these things as satire...because Olson didn't actually bother to clarify that his posts were satirical until several days after they were made (and importantly, several days after the article itself was originally written). Both Olson and Bloomberg had bad judgment here. A political appointee should not have made sarcastically anti-anti-Semitic statements, because he should have had the brainpower to know that in the Trump administration such statements would be taken at face value. And Bloomberg probably should have revised the article to add a paragraph about how a Trump appointee's anti-Semitic statements were actually anti-anti-Semitic in light of additional context that wasn't in the posts at the time they were made.
  - adolph 7y ago
    Oh hai Mayor B, You forgot the part where the reporter deliberately cut off the part of the post that referred to the comment as satire.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      No, there was no part of the post starting that it was satire. That came in a follow-up post made several days later.
duxup 7y ago
I'm still not sure what to think of that. I don't think there's much of any "evidence" to prove it and a hack like that is pretty. Then again nobody ... did anything after that either and everyone responded kinda awkwardly about it. I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks?
- hrktb 7y ago
  Wouldn’t Apple or Amazon suing Bloomberg force them to provide details and access to their farms in ways that could expose more info than they are willing to give ? I think about the kind of info we only get when lawsuits happen, and here the suing party could be losing more in collateral damage for just punishing a petty journal ?
  - duxup 7y ago
    Possibly that's the case.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- phkahler 7y ago
  >> I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks? Sure. What if the boards were hacked, but not by the Chinese? What if some company insiders knew? Just wildly speculating, but the response at the time seemed odd to me.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
And yet not a single one of those massive companies has attempted to sue Bloomberg into the ground. Bloomberg never even retracted or apologized. The silence following that whole debacle is deafening and probably very telling...
- user5994461 7y ago
  It's win win for everybody. The narrative supports the effort to have less dependency toward China manufacturing and it's in line with the later China-US trade war.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
gamblor956 7y ago
The Big China Chip Hack was never actually debunked. It was refuted, yes, but every company always does that, right up until they admit in a court settlement that the allegations were true all along. Despite the supposedly slanderous statements, none of the supposedly slandered companies has sued over the article, even though in several cases they suffered material impacts to their stock prices and financial results. ...But nothing. Despite supposedly defamatory statements, nothing was done by any of the companies mentioned in the article. Comments here have mention the Streisand effect as the reason for inaction, but the Streisand effect does not apply to defamation. The concept behind the Streisand effect is that efforts to censor information just result in greater dissemination. However, in a defamation lawsuit with potentially billions of dollars of damages at stake, you want greater dissemination of the defamatory statements, because that increases the payout at the end of the road. And because with enough money you can recover from the negative PR (see, e.g, Tylenol, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, BP, etc.).
- driverdan 7y ago
  It doesn't need to be debunked. Bloomberg never produced any evidence. Until they produce an example board it's safe to assume the story is garbage.
  - nl 7y ago
    That seems a vanishingly impossible standard of truth. None of the companies affected want people to know they were affected, and the people within the national security complex are unlikely to hand out physical evidence.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Bloomberg did provide evidence. In the article. You supply refuse to accept it as evidence of their claims. They aren't obligated to provide more evidence, especially since their report has not been debunked in any way.
    - modo_mario 7y ago
      And what evidence might that be?

by fbn79 7y ago

aguyfromnb 7y ago

This story is so odd to me. On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story, saying that all these big companies were hacked, why didn't anybody sue them? It was a major accusation! It just kinda...disappeared.

austhrow743 7y ago
>It just kinda...disappeared. This might be the answer to you second question. No one seems to have taken the Bloomberg story to be true. Just went "that's dumb" and dropped it. In fact the only times I've ever seen it resurface is in a context to point out something negative about Bloomberg (like now), not the companies named in the article. Sort of like the Elon Musk defamation case that just ended. Plaintiff didn't get anything because people didn't turn on him due to the accusation, they turned on Elon. If it's not believed then you couldn't have suffered harm.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  Super Micro's stock dropped about 30% and took months to recover.
  - privateprofile 7y ago
    And was there any legal action from Super Micro or other affected parties, like in this case?
  - r00fus 7y ago
    I wonder if there were fraudulent stock transactions during that period (ie, not insider trading but stock manipulation).
- Lammy 7y ago
  I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story with the lack of proof, but considering how such an attack is within the realm of possibility it seems foolish to not assume the handful of the most powerful and well-funded groups on Earth are doing such a thing. I’m not going to leave my door unlocked at night, for example, until my neighbor gets robbed and proves to me that is possible.
  - close04 7y ago
    > I believe it. Maybe not for that exact story So you don't believe it, you believe another story. Bloomberg didn't say "this is possible" they said "this is happening and here are the exact details".
    - Lammy 7y ago
      I believe it is happening, yes. The obvious plausibility and the way I’ve seen other state-sponsored things (any state) hushed up means the only reasonable thing for me to do is assume the story is based on truth even if the picture isn’t 100% complete. To put it another way, I believe the Bloomberg story is the “Room 641A” to a Snowden-level expose we may never get.
      - close04 7y ago
        > I believe it is happening, yes > obvious plausibility > assume As I see it you don't actually believe that particular story, you believe something "like that" is plausible. So in other words Bloomberg wrote some plausible fiction. Nobody is saying something like that isn't possible, just that if we wanted to read fiction Bloomberg wouldn't be the place to look for it. Given the string of high profile misreporting and failures to substantiate their claims one would have to be very gullible to still take Bloomberg reporting at face value without being presented with some hard proof and 3rd party confirmation.
elliekelly 7y ago
And Bloomberg never retracted it. It’s still up on their site. Not even an editors note acknowledging the criticism. I agree it’s all very odd. I wonder if we’ll ever get the story behind the story.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  There is nothing secret. Bloomberg pays reporters to move markets, not to tell facts. This one moved markets, so it was a good story. I suppose it has other uses too, like making Michael Bloomberg look good.
MertsA 7y ago
>why didn't anybody sue them? What exactly would they sue them for? Defamation and libel claims don't just require the defendant to be wrong, they have to have known or ought to have known that the claims were false. If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >If Bloomberg could point to some outside source, anonymous or not, I don't see a way that Supermicro could meet the standard of proof necessary to sue them over it. I guess that would be up to the courts to decide, wouldn't it? Considering they said Apple and AWS were compromised, that's a lot of firepower. I'm skeptical that "some anonymous source told us, and we choose to believe it" would pass legal muster, especially when you are publishing something as a major media source. But anything is possible.
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> On the one hand, if true, all Bloomberg had to do was produce evidence; a single compromised server. They didn't. If the story were true, under what circumstances could Bloomberg reports have come into possession of a compromised sever to satisfy this requirement? > On the other hand, if the journalists fabricated the entire story Journalists evaluate and report what they're told by sources. For instance: they don't do scientific experiments themselves, but rather interview scientists about their results and report their statements. Their quality control is to get multiple sources to corroborate each other. Saying Bloomberg journalists "fabricated" the story is going too far. If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest.
- aguyfromnb 7y ago
  >If it's false, what's likely is that either their sources were either mistaken or dishonest. So where is the retraction or followup reporting? Do they still believe it to be true? That's interesting in itself, is it not?
- PeterisP 7y ago
  It's kind of not the case here. First, they're not required to take any claims at face value, they can (and would be expected to) verify if they're actually true by looking at the evidence their sources provide - and if there's no evidence, then they'd be expected to note that it's all speculation. Second, at least some of the claimed sources were not anonymous and were interviewed later by others (there were a few HN threads back them some weeks after the initial story) and they explicitly disclaimed that they have confirmed the case, but rather that all they have told Bloomberg is essentially "something like this might be theoretically possible, sure, but the current evidence doesn't suggest that this has happened" - so we have some evidence that these Bloomberg journalists "attempted" to corroborate multiple sources which did not confirm the story that they wanted to tell, but they went ahead with the story anyway.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Buy it from a data center sale? We nuked our drives and sold the rest to a liquidation company when we moved to GCP. It's trivial to pick these up. It's Bloomberg, my dudes. That news source is the lowest quality trusted news source. I like that they can stay in business though. Made a neat 30+% on SMCI easy peasy. And that requires people like you to trust Bloomberg so that's good.

adolph 7y ago

And Leif Olson https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/bloomberg-law-retracts-story-labor-department-appointee-leif-olson/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/04/bloomberg...

gamblor956 7y ago
Bad example. All of the allegations in the Bloomberg article were true. Leif Olson actually did all of the things alleged, however the Bloomberg article missed that he supposedly did these things as satire...because Olson didn't actually bother to clarify that his posts were satirical until several days after they were made (and importantly, several days after the article itself was originally written). Both Olson and Bloomberg had bad judgment here. A political appointee should not have made sarcastically anti-anti-Semitic statements, because he should have had the brainpower to know that in the Trump administration such statements would be taken at face value. And Bloomberg probably should have revised the article to add a paragraph about how a Trump appointee's anti-Semitic statements were actually anti-anti-Semitic in light of additional context that wasn't in the posts at the time they were made.
- adolph 7y ago
  Oh hai Mayor B, You forgot the part where the reporter deliberately cut off the part of the post that referred to the comment as satire.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    No, there was no part of the post starting that it was satire. That came in a follow-up post made several days later.

duxup 7y ago

I'm still not sure what to think of that. I don't think there's much of any "evidence" to prove it and a hack like that is pretty. Then again nobody ... did anything after that either and everyone responded kinda awkwardly about it. I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks?

hrktb 7y ago
Wouldn’t Apple or Amazon suing Bloomberg force them to provide details and access to their farms in ways that could expose more info than they are willing to give ? I think about the kind of info we only get when lawsuits happen, and here the suing party could be losing more in collateral damage for just punishing a petty journal ?
- duxup 7y ago
  Possibly that's the case.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
phkahler 7y ago
>> I can't help but wonder if they got it dead wrong, but anyone clarifying or suing to prove otherwise would expose something else and so ... nobody talks? Sure. What if the boards were hacked, but not by the Chinese? What if some company insiders knew? Just wildly speculating, but the response at the time seemed odd to me.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

And yet not a single one of those massive companies has attempted to sue Bloomberg into the ground. Bloomberg never even retracted or apologized. The silence following that whole debacle is deafening and probably very telling...

user5994461 7y ago
It's win win for everybody. The narrative supports the effort to have less dependency toward China manufacturing and it's in line with the later China-US trade war.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gamblor956 7y ago

The Big China Chip Hack was never actually debunked. It was refuted, yes, but every company always does that, right up until they admit in a court settlement that the allegations were true all along. Despite the supposedly slanderous statements, none of the supposedly slandered companies has sued over the article, even though in several cases they suffered material impacts to their stock prices and financial results. ...But nothing. Despite supposedly defamatory statements, nothing was done by any of the companies mentioned in the article. Comments here have mention the Streisand effect as the reason for inaction, but the Streisand effect does not apply to defamation. The concept behind the Streisand effect is that efforts to censor information just result in greater dissemination. However, in a defamation lawsuit with potentially billions of dollars of damages at stake, you want greater dissemination of the defamatory statements, because that increases the payout at the end of the road. And because with enough money you can recover from the negative PR (see, e.g, Tylenol, Ford, Toyota, Tesla, BP, etc.).

driverdan 7y ago
It doesn't need to be debunked. Bloomberg never produced any evidence. Until they produce an example board it's safe to assume the story is garbage.
- nl 7y ago
  That seems a vanishingly impossible standard of truth. None of the companies affected want people to know they were affected, and the people within the national security complex are unlikely to hand out physical evidence.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Bloomberg did provide evidence. In the article. You supply refuse to accept it as evidence of their claims. They aren't obligated to provide more evidence, especially since their report has not been debunked in any way.
  - modo_mario 7y ago
    And what evidence might that be?