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Amazon Has Pulled Ads From Bloomberg Over Controversial 'Big Hack' Chinese Spy Story; Apple Has Not Invited Outlet's Reporters To a Product Event Next Week (buzzfeednews.com)
Both Amazon and Apple are taking retributive measures against Bloomberg, which in a report earlier this month alleged that some motherboards used by these companies were hacked by China. From a report: Amazon pulled its fourth quarter advertisements on Bloomberg's website, a move some within the media giant think is retribution for its controversial story alleging that Chinese spies hacked into the online retailer's servers. According to a source in position to know, Amazon's digital media buyer, Initiative, informed Bloomberg's sales staff on October 16 that it would cancel its ad buys for the fourth quarter due to budget cuts. Internally, the source said, the staff received that decision, made only eight days after a previous communication with Initiative confirming that the ads would run, as a direct response to Amazon's displeasure over the October 4 story. (Amazon announced Thursday that its marketing expenses for Q3 2018 were 3.3 billion dollars, up more than 800 million dollars from the year before.) [...] According to multiple sources, Bloomberg was not invited to Apple's fall product event next week in Brooklyn. Further reading: In an Unprecedented Move, Apple CEO Tim Cook Calls For Bloomberg To Retract Its Chinese Spy Chip Story.
They don't want to go through discovery, they just want to bury the news.
You mean bullshit; because the entire article was bullshit.
It reeks of a hatchet job planted by Trump's camp followers going after "Leftist Apple" and the "Chinese".
You're accusing Bloomberg planting a pro-Trump hatchet job against Apple and "the Chinese"?
You're accusing a highly-reputable business news company of planting a political hatchet job that doesn't mention politics?
Most absurdly, you're accusing a magazine owned by Leftist politician Michael Bloomberg of running PRO-TRUMP stories?!
There's something wrong with you.
Logical Fallacy: Appeal to absurdity.
Slapping a chip on a board won't do anything like what they claimed it would do; they would need to completely redo the board for the needed connections to get the desired effects and that would be obvious by visual inspection--not just a piece of dust on the board. (Even if the chip contained something small like BIOS tweaks to upload a malicious payload to the CPU. ) Then they would need to enable remote connections through the firewall and bypass the IDS for the chips to actually do something useful, like spying, for them.
The behavior and design of those boards is known well in advance because they have to fit in a certain cabinet and model the thermodynamics and power use of the boards to keep them from overheating once they're in place. It's not just picking a bunch of components, slapping them on a board, then watching them work. But thats apparently what Bloomberg and it's readers think.
I'd guess that the story is true and the affected megacorps are trying to cover it up. I'd guess that these megacorps are cooperating with the TLAs investigating the issue, and don't want the story made public because they'd rather not go public about a data breach (at least not individually and earlier than necessary), which the TLAs would also prefer in this case. So the media would be both compromising the investigation and bringing bad PR to the victims by reporting on this.
In a couple years we'll probably hear that it was all true and the affected companies will jointly disclose the data breach.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel