Bloomberg says super micro servers sold to Apple and Amazon contain spy chips, all three companies (and department of Homeland security) deny this

[DrMacintosh]

I’m convinced now that Bloomberg is just wrong. 

Their journalism has become subpar as of late. 

[mr moose]

2 things stand out to me:

 

1. why people believe only China are evil in the way they govern does my head in.  All governments to a larger or lesser degree are not very nice.  Generally speaking the bigger the country the bigger the issues therefore the more protective they get and and as a consequence the more insidious the action.  There is a reason NZ, Austrailia, sweden norway etc all have better governance.

 

2. The same people that think china are the only ones who do evil things are also the ones that think china are incapable of producing anything of quality, therefore there is no need to worry about this because by their logic most of the chips likely will fail and send the data to an invalid URL.

[Stefan Payne]

On 10/4/2018 at 4:20 PM, Taf the Ghost said:

So there's roughly two ways this can go:

1) More confirmation of why destroying local production was a massive National Security disaster for the USA 

or 

2) Full Scale Fake News!

Either way, this should be fun.

2 Of Course and I hope that Bloomberg gets sued to Smithereens because of this Fake News Story.

 

Because what ever they mentioned in the article is just untechnical, written by a guy who has no clue what the heck he's writing about, their descriptions are wrong.

 

And the Pictures of the devices are either an SMD thingy in the 0201 or 0402 size. 

Does anyone really think that you can get the needed intelligence in such a small device?? I don't...

That's usually some really stupid thing like a Resistor, Capacitor, maybe a Coil and at most a diode that is sold in these sizes.

 

For some real intelligence you need a bigger package and also a couple of more pins. And also some interface to the CPU or something that really has an impact (or Access to the System Memory, wich doesn't really happen these days - IOMMU for the Win). 

 

This "mystery device" looks like it does something in the CPU Power Supply Section. Maybe its a temperature dependant resistor to measure the temperature there??

[Stefan Payne]

On 10/5/2018 at 4:42 AM, DrMacintosh said:

I’m convinced now that Bloomberg is just wrong. 

Their journalism has become subpar as of late. 

So another 4Chan Hitjob??

Looks like they troll everyone and everything these days

[D13H4RD]

Yeah......let's not pretend China is the only one conducting some form of intricate espionage

[Bananasplit_00]

1 hour ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

Yeah......let's not pretend China is the only one conducting some form of intricate espionage

your profile pic with that  lmao

[xentropa]

No freaking way a rice sized chip with what appears to only have 6 pins be able to tap into the DRAM CPU bus.

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

So another 4Chan Hitjob??

Looks like they troll everyone and everything these days

Between okay sign and it's okay to be white and iwave they're on a roll. 

/gif and /pol best boards 

[Sauron]

SuperMicro is one of the top dogs in their field, it would be a pretty big scandal if any of this were true.

[mr moose]

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

SuperMicro is one of the top dogs in their field, it would be a pretty big scandal if any of this were true.

it would also be a pretty big scandal if it turned out to be rumours started by someone looking to buy cheap shares in profitable companies.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, mr moose said:

it would also be a pretty big scandal if it turned out to be rumours started by someone looking to buy cheap shares in profitable companies.

Probably just someone suckered in to the next big break, being technology related a lot of journalists don't have enough knowledge to litmus test this sort of thing and eagerness can get in the way of due diligence by not consulting enough industry experts.

[Jtalk4456]

Quote

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.

oh crap! Apple has contacts in the police! The computers are rising up to take over!

[Whiskers]

Thread cleaned.

 

As per the Community Standards political discussion isn't allowed. Whilst this thread is inherently political to an extent, it is not an appropriate place to begin discussing international politics or the merit of various countries' actions.

 

Keep things civil and respectful please, and keep political discussion to a minimum - otherwise this thread will need to be locked.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Does anyone know if this affects pretty much all SuperMicro servers / motherboards?  Or does it mostly affect certain generations / SKUs?

 

For example, I was maybe thinking of using something like one of these in a NAS build sometime....

   

 

Along with a few of something like these.

But, since I already have  (was in my laptop until I upgraded to a 6700K a couple Black Fridays ago) ... would it be better to get  instead?

 

I'm kinda leaning away from that LGA 1151 option though, because of not having enough PCIe lanes (to add a bunch of LSI SAS HBAs) like the SuperMicro boards have, and DDR4 RAM is crazy expensive, whereas DDR2 is super cheap and even DDR3 isn't all that outgrageous.

 

 

Basically, in a nutshell ... is it still safe to get Socket 771, 1366 or 2011 (Sandy Bridge) Supermicro motherboards?

[ScratchCat]

3 hours ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Basically, in a nutshell ... is it still safe to get Socket 771, 1366 or 2011 (Sandy Bridge) Supermicro motherboards?

Older boards yes, if this is true then they wouldn't have had the resources and if not you would still be fine.

 

Newer ones, wait and see how this plays out.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

1 hour ago, ScratchCat said:

Older boards yes, if this is true then they wouldn't have had the resources and if not you would still be fine.

 

Newer ones, wait and see how this plays out.

What do you think would be the newest safe generation?  The newest I've generally been looking at was X9 (LGA 2011 Sandy/Ivy Bridge), but mostly been looking at X8 (LGA 1366) as well as X7 (LGA 771).  I've also seen maybe a few X10 (LGA 2011-3) and H11 (TR4), but CPUs and RAM would still be a bit pricey, even if I could maybe squeeze a board into the budget.  The oldest ones I've looked at were X6, but I've generally rejected X5 as none of them have PCIe support which would be required to support the LSI SAS HBAs.  (At least, I don't know of any PCI-X or legacy PCI SATA cards that support multiple 6Gb/s drives or drives > 2TB.)

 

Speaking of budget, I'd ideally like to keep it down such that the entire system, not counting storage, would be cheaper than a single 5400rpm 6 or 8TB HDD, but am also considering expanding it somewhat.  I'm finding that maybe going for like an $100/$155 X8DTH-iF/6F or $225 X9DRH-7F would get me a LOT more PCIe & RAM support than, say, a $55 X7DWE.  Also, X8 is the oldest I've seen that has BIOS updates for Meltdown/Spectre (I forget which is fixed in BIOS vs in OS.)

[jasonvp]

On 10/8/2018 at 10:14 AM, PianoPlayer88Key said:

What do you think would be the newest safe generation?

I seriously would not worry about this whatsoever.  Even if it is true (which there's YOOOOGE amounts of evidence that says it isn't).  If this supposed chip is actually there, it's inline with the hardware management Ethernet port on the motherboard.  What is sometimes referred to as the DRAC or ILO port on the motherboard.  Not a network port that the OS interacts with.

 

In other words: if it's there (it isn't...) then the easy solution is: don't connect the hardware management Ethernet port to anything.  And if you do connect that Ethernet port to a network, make sure that network can't NAT outbound to the Internet.  Problem solved.

 

 

[asus killer]

The US paranoia with China is off the rails. Meanwhile Russia is doing much worst and no one there cares. Jesus this is insane.

[JoostinOnline]

The fact that The Verge is one of your listed sources almost makes me trust Bloomberg. XD

[GoldenLag]

7 minutes ago, asus killer said:

The US paranoia with China is off the rails. Meanwhile Russia is doing much worst and no one there cares. Jesus this is insane.

I guess its because Russia stopped being a treath to the US and west after the Soviet Union collapesed. 

 

Lets be honest here. china is on road to become the largest world power. India is following suite

[asus killer]

9 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

I guess its because Russia stopped being a treath to the US and west after the Soviet Union collapesed. 

 

Lets be honest here. china is on road to become the largest world power. India is following suite

economically yes, but military no. China is way behind both US and Russia, they still buy a lot of Russian military material because they simply lack the technology, and as far as i know that wont change anytime soon

 

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/u-s-sanctions-china-for-buying-russian-fighter-jets-missiles/articleshow/65896016.cms

 

then again i see your point i was seeing this as a military spying and it's in fact economic. 

[NumLock21]

Serve the home did a investigation on it and this is what they found out.

 

https://www.servethehome.com/bloomberg-reports-china-infiltrated-the-supermicro-supply-chain-we-investigate/

[Inelastic]

Bloomberg has a new story about a US Telecom company having found hacked hardware. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-09/new-evidence-of-hacked-supermicro-hardware-found-in-u-s-telecom

[captain_to_fire]

Bloomberg as it turns out once again, fake news. See Twitter thread below.

https://risky.biz/RB517_feature/

Edit: Here's another one more evidence that Bloomberg is fake news.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cyber-britain/uk-cyber-security-agency-backs-apple-amazon-china-hack-denials-idUSKCN1MF1DN

Edited October 10, 2018 by captain_to_fire

[Canada EH]

On 10/4/2018 at 6:15 AM, spartaman64 said:

unnoticed by their engineers who will probably know the board layout like the back if their hand.

 

Yes yes yes, this is why the people need to stand up and block asian countries buying up everything, real estate, companies EVERYTHING. Who knows what they are putting into cell phones to dominate the world. Dont have to look far Google and Facebook are major offenders. Greedy!