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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."
Anyone who read the article would realise that they were planning on doing exactly that. There is, in fact, a 6-prong plan to make Apple entirely independent of third parties. Part of this involves designing and building their own servers.
Personally I'd be interested in knowing if they're going to use ARM processors... Those A9X are pretty darn good in terms of computing power per watt.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The same thing that happens to every country.
You see, there is a subset of humans that are interested in having power over other humans. That is their primary drive. Over time such people infect all levels of government, law enforcement, and the upper tier of wealthy business controllers. Each and every day, they find ways of using the power they have to gain even more power, and they never get tired of doing this, and they never give up when defeated.
Your privacy is a degree of personal power that you would like to keep for yourself. Unfortunately, they want it, and you can't both have it. So, they have taken it.
Everything that you (and the majority of your social class) aren't willing to violently defend will eventually be taken from you.
Anyone who read the article would realise that they were planning on doing exactly that.
Assuming what you say plays out - and I read it exactly the same way you did - it will be interesting to see if, at some point, Apple decides to re-enter the server market. I mean, if they're going to be building their own servers anyway, why not see if you can sell a few? There might be people willing to spend the necessary bucks for an Apple-built server, given their stance on privacy and the current lack of trust many techies have for the US government (or most other governments, for that matter).
#DeleteChrome
When I worked at the Google help desk in 2008, the powers to be were talking about moving away from the Lenovo laptops because they suspected that the Chinese government were putting a backdoor into the BIOS. When I did contract work for a Google data center in 2011, the only laptops I saw were MacBook Pros from Apple.
Once I worked for an industrial supplier. An international transport company was stealing our chips and inserting their own low-lifespan knockoffs. We would have never known if our customers didn't tell us. They found out by base-lining machines and realizing that some of the new chips coming in had markings that were in a different font.
If they didn't take pictures of their known-good equipment to compare against, no one would have known and we would have taken the fall for selling bad equipment.
So you can buy Chinese components and be hacked by the PRC.
Or go to any Five-Eyes nation, and get the same experience. Ditto Russia. Anywhere else, bribery is all the NSA needs.
Unless you're fabricating everything, and writing you're own microcode, there's always a chance someone is going to slip a backdoor in somewhere.
That won't help. One of your key employees works for the NSA. It's practical to introduce a change to a mask (after all reviews etc) that subverts the on-chip random number generator, which is all the NSA really needs. There's real worry this has already happened at Intel (I can't remember whether the Snowden revelations included this, or it just seemed logical to crypto geeks).
There were long discussions on Bruce Schneier's blog about how building a hardware RNG from discrete components you soldered together yourself was the only way to be sure (resistor thermal noise is a pretty good hardware entropy source).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.