Who do you believe — the shills at Bloomberg trying to garner clicks or the techFAGS at Amazon and Apple who depend on China for their manufacturing?
If true, BIG.
Data center equipment run by Amazon Web Services and Apple may have been subject to surveillance from the Chinese government via a tiny microchip inserted during the equipment manufacturing process, according to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek report on Thursday. The claims in the report have been strongly disputed by the technology giants.
The chips, which Bloomberg said have been the subject of a top secret U.S. government investigation starting in 2015, were used for gathering intellectual property and trade secrets from American companies and may have been introduced by a Chinese server company called Super Micro that assembled machines used in the centers.
Apple, AWS and Super Micro dispute the report. Apple said it did not find the chips as asserted by BusinessWeek — which cited anonymous government and corporate sources. Super Micro reportedly denied that it introduced the chips during the manufacturing.
Asked by CNBC for comment, Apple pointed to denials already published by Bloomberg.
Apple has issued strong denials of the report, stating: “We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. 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. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.”
AWS has also denied the report, telling Bloomberg: “We’ve found no evidence to support claims of malicious chips or hardware modifications.”
Here’s the full report.
I hate trying to be cajoled into hating another country. It’s just above my tolerance threshold now. Whether China did this or not, I really don’t care. If Apple is stupid enough to simply give away their tech, well they deserve to be cannibalized by Chinese pirates.
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Technically possible
Realistically improbable
With all the people running and checking out everything their phone does via network sniffers and the people opening up the phones to see what’s new… and why it’s .001oz heavier…
I find it very improbable that something like this could or would exist.
And does Bloomberg have any actual proof? I mean if there’s a chip in all these devices, it would be published by now and easily accessible and tested.
So back to technically possible, but realistically improbable.
Well put.
It’s not in your telescreen, it’s in SuperMicro motherboards.
I have no idea about the Chicom spy chip, however we should all know by now that:
Stuff that’s technically possible, known to have been done by a wide variety of technical experts and even eye witnesses, can be done and the people will believe whatever they are told and whatever the powers that be want us to believe.
Probably not another chip but I wouldn’t put it past them to insert some rogue lines of software somewhere into the system. They are experts at it.