Wait until they learn what Edward Snowden leaked about our own NSA.

A friend of mine was at a technical conference and a vendor's booth had a massive Israeli flag over it. That vendor? Using another company's software to install a root kit on your servers. So basically, you pay to give Mossad a back door to all your shit.

I want to run a bit on the hardware where I talk about how China is ahead of everyone in chip manufacturing and then point to this as my proof.

To the ones who might say this is fake, I'll call them tankies and ask if they think all the other stuff the US says is fake too. Like concentration camps against Muslims and Tank Man, while posting legitimate sources and denying their authenticity.

I wonder if I could get anyone contrarian enough to believe me and read the sources. Sometimes I see users comment "you didn't even read your own source" and I'm hoping some of them might. I feel the contrarianism might be stronger than their other prejudices.

Any thoughts? Besides the risk of attracting right folks.

Of course every accusation is projection: the US forces motherboard companies to include the NSA's TPM on all boards, and CPU companies to include whatever bs management engines as well.

Hasn't Intel literally done this on all of their processors?

Pretty sure they just take actual cases of espionage and replace "Israel" and "America" with "CPC."

Personally I love looking back at the threads and seeing commenters jump through every loophole available to justify a chip that physically could not possibly exist (or if it did exist then China is secretly 250 years ahead of the world in terms of chip manufacturing). Just one example of the gymnastics.

I remember when this article came out- I was working in an RMA department for a third party company that made servers for Amazon and Apple.

We specialized in the exact motherboard that this bloomberg article rattled on about. I dont know if this is worth bringing onto the table, but those units had extremely high fail rate. They either burned up or killed whatever components was installed on them (ECC Dimms were common victims). Also SuperMicro is based in San Jose and the founder is from Taiwan so...

My co-worker and I suspect this was a streisand effect to get techbros wooed into or at least talking about the OCP (Open compute project - which was a few years old, but iirc was starting to hobble financially when this article came out)

Even IF you took that tabloid at face value, wouldn't China be selecting a board that doesnt cook itself after a 40 min burn-in test?

no actually i dont remember this at all

The adults in the room

I cant comment on this story, but there have been instances of companies (not nations) setting up malware and spyware within the chipsets of things like android TV boxes. Sometimes the code is there to disguise lower specs and sell as higher spec online. Linus Tech Tips did a thing on it, as did a few other tech experts in the media.

Thats the issue we should be worried about. China doesnt need to hack anything in reality. We post everything online anyway.

The actual details of this were so fucking stupid. This imbecile journalist basically asked some guy "hey theoretically could you put an IC in passive component" to some guy, that journalist took the exact part the guy used as a hypothetical, claimed china made a super secret IC that looked like a passive with no proof, then accused some random Taiwanese-American's company as compromised (with some racebaiting too, "they got hacked because they speak chinese"). No super secret microchips were ever found but that company did go bankrupt iirc. But now they've done a 180° turn and Taiwan is supposed to be on the US's side (don't ask where all the TSMC engineers are moving tho).

This is just the back story of Homefront with North Korea replaced with China.

It might have been a deliberate market manipulation. You don't need facts if you just want to trigger a stampede.

I recall one of the firms incriminated, the share price halved overnight; since then it's recovered and increased tenfold. Someone made bank there.