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AWS CEO Andy Jassy Follows Apple In Calling For Retraction of Chinese Spy Chip Story (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, followed Apple's lead in calling the for the retraction of Bloomberg's story about spy chips being embedded in servers. "They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories," Jassy wrote in a tweet on Monday. "Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract."
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.
"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.
"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"
If it were just Apple, or Amazon claiming the story was false I'd be dubious.
But it's both companies. And the NSA, and every other news organization that has gone looking. All are coming up blank on this.
At some point you have to go with the "simplest answer is correct", which means that Bloomberg is wrong in this case. The real question to my mind is, how did they go so badly wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They denied it, then denied it more fully, then followed up with a more clear and forceful denial. If it turns out to be true, the SEC will decide which executives they want to put in prison for material false statements.
The amount and type of denials aren't necessary and wouldn't be appropriate if the story was actually true. The executives have no reason put themselves at risk denying it in the *manner* that they have. If it were true, they'd very much want to use more Clintonian statements like "we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip". That statement is technically true if they know *someone* installed a surveillance chip, but don't know that China did it. That denial would be true if they know that China installed a rogue chip, but don't know that it's necessarily a surveillance chip.
If it were true, I'd expect a detail like ""we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip", something that is technically true so they'd at least have some negotiating room when the SEC comes after them for material false statements.
Public company, short the stocks, spread a story voila big profits to be made. It's all part of the corporate wars, using various criminal methods and attack and destroy other corporations, spreading misinformation just a minor part, computer hacking of all kinds, corrupting staff in competing companies and you can expect targeted assassination to follow. American special services are no bragging about post employment for profit assassination program. So take out a critical executive, at a critical time, can cripple a corporation, done right there in GTAV or is that GTGV(grand theft gaming), that hacks certainly are and it is contractors hacking contracts because that is the way the fuckwit US government decided to go in all of its grand idiocracy.
Follow the money.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
My experience with them is a few years old, and it's from the finance industry, so not directly related to using them for cloud services. SuperMicro sells on price and density. SuperMicro have products that are two complete, fully independent servers in a 1U rack enclosure. They're also very cheap. Now to achieve this, something's got to give, so there are some compromises.
SuperMicro servers aren't as feature-rich as something you'll get from Dell or HP. For example the out-of-band management isn't as sophisticated, the storage controllers aren't as configurable, and you don't have as many options for NIC modules. The build quality isn't spectacular either - they're definitely not as physically robust or convenient to work on as a Dell PowerEdge.
In terms of performance, they weren't really competitive with Dell or IBM for single-CPU throughput or wire-to-wire latency. Whether this is important or not depends heavily on your application. If you're doing something like online transaction processing where latency isn't critical, you might get better overall performance by going with SuperMicro and making the most of the higher density and lower price. But that's not going to help you if your application depends on good wire-to-wire latency.
Failure rates weren't much worse than HP really. After-sales support from SuperMicro isn't great, but remember you're paying a lot less. If you're prepared to do more of your service/support in-house rather than dealing with the manufacturer or a value-added reseller, SuperMicro might be better value.
TL;DR SuperMicro's offerings aren't as good in terms of performance, build-quality and vendor support, but they try to make up for it with low cost and high density. Depending on your application, it may be a win.