10-09-2018, 09:38 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/27...o-congress
Quote:Yet here we are, five days later, and the findings Bloomberg alleged have not yet been confirmed by any other outlets. The companies involved continue to strongly protest. Bloomberg continues to just as strongly stand by its story. The potential involvement of national security complicates things because the federal government is perfectly capable of ordering a company to lie about whether it’s received a message — yet companies that are lying tend to err on the side of saying precisely what they can say and precious little else. It’s the surest way to stay out of trouble. Could the story and strongly-worded denials still be part of a national security story meant to sow FUD about what the United States actually knows or doesn’t know about the intelligence capabilities of China? Sure. At this point that makes as much sense as anything. But the fundamentals of this situation don’t make much sense, period.
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I may have personally bit a bit too fast to dismiss Apple’s denial. At this point, I’m genuinely unsure. But only one set of stories can be right here. Either these events happened or they didn’t — and so far, there’s no independent confirmation that Bloomberg’s story is true. At the same time, the news of a hardware attack like this — a long-theorized attack vector — that didn’t happen would be astonishingly irresponsible. For all that Apple implies that Bloomberg just got the story wrong, stories that are researched for a year shouldn’t be the kind of stories it’s possible to just “get wrong.” This isn’t a report that one person knocked together in two hours for an online article. And the larger the feature, the more eyes typically on a story before it goes live.
People like to cynically imply that the media does everything it does for clicks, but it makes precious little sense to launch a story of this magnitude on a hoax. The damage to personal and corporate reputation and potential future advertising income outstrips any possible gains from a few days of increased traffic. And given that federal sources were involved in sourcing the story, it’s not clear what national security concerns might also be in play, further clouding the issue.
It’s not clear who’s lying, who’s telling the truth, and who might just be monumentally mistaken. But we’re not to the bottom of this story yet.