6 ms·

Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence. The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has

by xevb3k 8y ago

Two different stories, about two very different situations. There’s not really much equivalence. The report contains elements are are near impossible, and has other aspects that are very unlikely. It has also been denied far more strongly than the Snowden leaks were. The biggest problem is really why would you do this? Either the report is wrong in significant ways, or it’s not true at all. The chip they show in the article, is a ceramic package which it would be really hard to embed a semiconductor in (because of the temperatures required to fire the ceramic). It looks like it probably would sit on an alternate footprint for the BCM flash. A ceramic part like that (which they say is for signal conditioning) doesn’t belong at that location anyway. If your going to develop some weird SMD capacitor sized package for a microcontroller... why not just develop a new BCM serial flash chip embedding the same functionally? At least that way the boards would look visually similar. So much just doesn’t make sense to me.

throwaway2048 8y ago
The Snowden leaks were denied plenty by the companies involved. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
- xevb3k 8y ago
  And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect? My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    And what about Amazon and Apple's denial will be found technically incorrect in a few years. EDIT: to the downvoters, its easy to play this game, Apple makes a large amount of very specific denials. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. What about investigations and law enforcement contacts via a third party (perhaps a specialized hardware security firm? ) 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. You mean the story they explicitly denied with similar strength (and wiggle room to boot when the truth came out) Apple is deeply committed to protecting the privacy and security of our customers and the data we store. We are constantly monitoring for any attacks on our systems, working closely with vendors and regularly checking equipment for malware. We’re not aware of any data being transmitted to an unauthorized party nor was any infected firmware found on the servers purchased from this vendor. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple-axed-supermicro-servers-from-datacenters-because-of-bad-firmware-update/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple...
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  These denials match up exactly with what was in the leaked documents. Greenwald and Snowden, out of incompetence, made a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations that were not supported by the documents that the companies denied.

by xevb3k 8y ago

throwaway2048 8y ago

The Snowden leaks were denied plenty by the companies involved. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html

xevb3k 8y ago
And is there anything in that denial that has been shown to be technically incorrect? My understanding is that there wasn’t involvement from google, that data was extracted without their knowledge from links between data centers.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  And what about Amazon and Apple's denial will be found technically incorrect in a few years. EDIT: to the downvoters, its easy to play this game, Apple makes a large amount of very specific denials. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement. What about investigations and law enforcement contacts via a third party (perhaps a specialized hardware security firm? ) 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. You mean the story they explicitly denied with similar strength (and wiggle room to boot when the truth came out) Apple is deeply committed to protecting the privacy and security of our customers and the data we store. We are constantly monitoring for any attacks on our systems, working closely with vendors and regularly checking equipment for malware. We’re not aware of any data being transmitted to an unauthorized party nor was any infected firmware found on the servers purchased from this vendor. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple-axed-supermicro-servers-from-datacenters-because-of-bad-firmware-update/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/apple...
lern_too_spel 8y ago
These denials match up exactly with what was in the leaked documents. Greenwald and Snowden, out of incompetence, made a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations that were not supported by the documents that the companies denied.