[cba123]

I sure wish Trump would be more aggressive on Trade.

But then again, nobody else has done a THING to protect American interests.

Nobody.

So Trump really seems to be on the correct approach, at the moment.

:)

[cba123]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/04/chinese-spy-chips-are-said-to-be-found-in-hardware-used-by-apple-amazon-apple-denies-the-bloomberg-businessweek-report.html

[Leo Carpathian]

Dumbest thing IBM did was to give away PC business to Chicoms!!

[109ACS]

Google decided to have their new Titan security keys manufactured in China. What could possibly go wrong?

I’m buying my keys from Yubico, manufactured in USA and Sweden.

[Bitman]

Reminds me of a 1st Gulf War story which told the tale of GPS chips in printers sold to Iraq. Put the printer in a comm center and poof... Comm center goes bye-bye in the bombing raid.

[polymuser]

AMAC (AARP for patriots) magazine just had a good article on “Drug Shortages: The Unknown Threat”. It’s about China’s ownership of our drug ingredients and manufacture, America’s lost drug capabilities and how our military gets most of its drugs from China. Duh!!!

[arthurus]

Electronic stuff made in China certainly has spy devices and soft or firmware installed.

[Pearls Before Swine]

This can’t be good for Huawei or ZTC.

Who would trust anything they make now? And, if it turns out they have bugged Apple devices, the uproar will be loud and long.

[Justa]

They may say “no” but unless they have a secured supply chain they’re just wishing it so.

It’s a big issue with the DoD, that electronic equipment is free of Chinese components. Unfortunately the private organizations which are entrusted to verifying sourcing of components are usually from the same industries making the electronics.

So are the Amazon and Apple DoD contracts are in jeopardy?

[ealgeone]

That’s nothing. They have a spy chip in the US Senate.

[afterhoursarmory]

I totally believe it. If it is not the chicom’s, its the NSA.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/

[huldah1776]

cool article at bloomberg. Love the graphics! I used to work at a chip dealer company. They were small 25 yrs ago so no surprise at how tiny the thing is. Always thought spying was a given. Even with our radios after fbi did it at Waco. Why bother with an EMP when a tiny chip can shut down main hubs?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

[Magnatron]

I was at a security conference a few months ago that had an international pavilion with vendors from around the world. The Chinese region had surveillance cameras, face recognition systems, analytics software programs. It struck me as odd that any American company would even remotely consider buying Chinese-made security and surveillance products.

[Ozark Tom]

DARPA has severed cooperative development ties with Silicon valley. Too cozy with the Chinese government, which is China manufacturing’s upper management.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Worked with an older engineer that came out of the defense industry.
He claimed that early missiles using magnetic core memory, the cores were subbed out to Taiwan bead stringers, not available in the USA.
He then claimed that the Taiwanese subbed them to the mainland.

Thusly, the missile brains were made in Red China???

[Swordmaker]

This headline is misleading. . . Apple was going to use the hardware in their iTunes Streaming video/movie service they were installing back in 2015-2016 order 30,000 rack mounted servers from Elemental Systems who had their servers made by Supermicro. However, even Bloomberg BusinessNews states that Apple cancelled the order when their engineers discovered the malicious IC chip on the motherboard of test units they received.

The more I think about this the less sense it makes for several very good reasons.

1. Both Amazon and Apple supposedly discovered this malicious IC chip in 2015, three years ago.
2. Nothing was said about it in any security bulletin to the industry warning about security problems with servers made in China.
3. IN THREE YEARS! Seriously?
4. Software could have been developed to disable or block transmission of the stolen data back to China since it was known. Really? The URL of the target server had to be available.
5. The revelation about this malicious chip comes from a single main stream media news source which cites only anonymous sources both in the impacted government and the two major companies, Amazon and Apple, the two largest companies in the world by market cap. Yet we hear crickets.
6. Other companies are vaguely mentioned but not by name.
7. Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro vigorously deny any such chip exists and that any such events happened.
8. Amazon acquired Elemental Systems in late 2015 and continued ordering Supermicro servers for use in their Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud and for Amazon Prime streaming video / movie service
9. AWS CEO independently said there were no spurious hardware installed in or on the Supermicro motherboards.
10. Apple did not break off doing business with Supermicro until sometime in 2016, selecting another supplier, perhaps due to the increased demand Amazon was placing on Supermicro due to growth of Amazon Prime.
11. Altering the design of a motherboard to add another chip is not an easy thing to due and must be done from engineering on. . . especially on a multilayered board.
12. None of the articles have shown this IC chip in situ on a motherboard, instead they show a photo of a generic miniature grain of wheat chip perched on a finger tip. Why not show one in situ?
13. No one has described how this tiny chip accomplishes what it accomplishes with the various scenarios a server environments that might be encountered. It just is.
14. The denial by both Apple management and Amazon management is backed by the fact that they face penalties if they are lying imposed by the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 which imposes PERSONAL fines of from $10 million to $20 million and imprisonment in a Federal institution for ten to twenty years. What incentive do these managers and officers have to lie. In Apple's case, they never even USED the products involved, cancelling the order.
15. Bloomberg has published FAKE NEWS before.

Given all that, something here doesn't smell right. . . my BS o'meter is almost pegged at 100%! —PING!

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