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Apple Worries Spy Technology Has Been Secretly Added To Computer Servers It Buys (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to Business Insider, "[Apple] worries that some of the equipment and cloud services it buys has been compromised by vendors who have agreed to put "back door" technology for government spying, according to a report from The Information's Amir Efrati and Steve Nellis." With many of its cloud-based services like iTunes, the App Store, and iCloud requiring enormous data center to operate, Apple hasn't been able to build all the data centers it needs, and has instead been using services from its rivals, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Google recently landed Apple as a customer for the Google Cloud Platform. "Meanwhile, [Apple] has embarked on yet another attempt to build more of its own data centers to handle all of that, called Project McQueen, reports Jordan Novet at VentureBeat, and the project is having a rough go of it, reports The Information." Apple suspects that backdoors have been added to many of the servers it has been ordering from others. "At one point, the company even had people taking photographs of the motherboards in the computer servers it was using, then mark down exactly what each chip was, to make sure everything was fully understood."
Assume your cloud service provider isn't secure.
Fuck backdoors, you can't vet their security or admin staff, you can't adequately audit their processes, you can't believe the marketing bullshit they produce.
So assume they're not secure.
How you deal with it isn't paranoia. Don't be bloody stupid.
Encrypt your data at rest. Control the keys yourself.
Encrypt your data in transit. Control the keys yourself.
Encrypt your keys. Fuck it, go whole hog if you're that worried about it.
But Apple aren't in any different position to anybody else, and photographing motherboards? Fuck me, get a life.
Because everyone knows that the US is the only country that spies on people ;-) Surely those good EU countries would never stoop to things like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec...
Guess you didn't read about the NSA program where they intercept hardware during shipping and install backdoors or othewise cause tampering.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Their servers were ARM stuff, so wouldn't work with VMs like you are talking about because ARM is not compatible with 90% of the software out there. Very likely though, they would go Intel instead of ARM for a new offering.
You're full of shit.
Apple's Servers were NEVER ARM, they were PowerPC G5s running OS X Server. And LONG before the XServe, Apple made some (non-rack-mount) Servers that ran AIX, and those were 68k-based.
I believe they already make some of their own chips.
Apple has never had a fab line. They certainly design many of their own chips (even up to the SoC level); but do not "fab" any of them. But you're right, they certainly could purchase a fab-line if they wanted to get into that headache.
Depending on the model iDevice you got, you got either a Samsung(?) or a chip made by Apple themselves.
Nope. It was either you got an iPhone with an SoC that was fab-ed by Samsung or TSMC; both of which were simultaneously producing the same ARM SoC under contract from Apple to meet demand (and to give Apple the advantages of having a "second source").
I seem to recall that Apple doesn't always release the MHz on their CPUs
Nope. Look in the "Tech Specs" section of any Apple Product Page.