“Media personalities have been bending over backward to find a way to square the claims made by Bloomberg in its ‘China Hack’ story with a series of strongly worded denials from Amazon and Apple insisting that the report was ‘wrong and misinformed,'” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “However, there is solid evidence that Bloomberg has previously published a series of false claims before, either from a lack of research coupled with bad perspective, or possibly to simply craft a dramatic narrative.”
“The tantalizing idea — as if ripped from the pages of a spy novel — that Chinese hackers had implanted chips into servers used by Apple and others to harvest data and spy on their users’ activities was instantly lapped up by Apple’s critics as rich dirt for seeding skepticism of Apple’s competence in security,” Dilger writes. “The story has also already begun sprouting conspiracy theories that imagined further out into the realm of possibility that perhaps China was using this silicon hardware bugging to turn defense contractors against America.”
“A much simpler explanation is that Bloomberg rushed to publish information that was wrong, in part because its journalists didn’t really understand what they were writing about, and in part because they didn’t need to care whether their report was absolutely true or not,” Dilger writes. “There is copious evidence of this in what Bloomberg has chosen to print about Apple over just the last two years.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: In other words, it seems that Bloomberg publishes fake news.
SEE ALSO:
U.S. Senators Rubio and Blumenthal demand answers from Supermicro over spy chip allegations – October 10, 2018
Apple CEO Tim Cook is in Shanghai in possible PR move after Bloomberg Businessweek’s spy chip yarn – October 9, 2018
One of Bloomberg’s sources told them Chinese spy chip story ‘didn’t make sense’ – October 9, 2018
Apple suppliers took an $18 billion stock hit after Bloomberg’s disputed China hacking report – October 5, 2018
UK cyber security agency backs Apple, Amazon China hack denials – October 5, 2018
Apple official statement: What Bloomberg Businessweek got wrong about Apple – October 5, 2018
Apple strongly disputes Bloomberg BusinessWeek report that Chinese ‘spy’ chips were found in iCloud servers – October 4, 2018
Michael Bloomberg has switched to the Democratic Party and is going to spend 80 million dollars to influence the mid term elections.
Someone say something about fake news?
Why hasn’t Daniel Eran Dilger gotten a Pulitzer yet?
All mass media and media in general has lost all integrity.. it is s one of the the most corrupt institutions in the world..
Tenticals of the powerful to manipulate the masses!
Caveat Emptor!!!
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
How about not even linking to anything from that rag.
This is not new. Back in the day I worked at Bell Labs and I would often read articles dealing with subjects I had expertise in and I would always find serious misinformation in the stories.
True. True.
One can trust Bloomberg more than AppleInsider, which acts as a bobblehead for all things Apple.
The 5 stories that AppleInsider claims IN HINDSIGHT that they subjectively label “wrong”:
1) Bloomberg reports that Apple struggles to make big deals. This is based on interviews with bankers who, off record, have seen Apple get beaten to the punch on numerous acquisitions. Apple’s biggest investment to date has been Beats, which Apple should have been able to create from the ground up in a fraction of the cost they wasted on Dre and Iovine.
2) Bloomberg disparages Apple TV — well duh. So does MDN and anyone who’s tried to use Apple TV. It remains stuck in last place among streaming players, it has a poor interface, and has among the least content of any, which charging a high device cost. What does AppleInsider bring for evidence that AppleTV is competing well? Not a thing.
3) Bloomberg Predicted Low Priced iPads — yep, and while they got the timing wrong, Apple eventually did slash prices on older model iPads because, as Bloomberg noted, iPad sales had leveled off. Apple continues to lose ground to Chromebooks and has totally lost the ecucation market because iOS can’t cut it. AppleInsider has nothing to offer there.
4) Bloomberg reports orders were slashed for the HomePod. Well guess what, THEY WERE. After the initial boom, HomePod sales have dropped significantly. AppleInsider claims that no, multiple assemblers were contracted to build all these HomePods that you now see everywhere. Yeah, AppleInsider thinks HomePod sales are strong. No evidence to support it though. Can’t even find a Homepod to save your life. Perhaps AppleInsider will point to forthcoming holiday blowout HomePod sales at Costco as evidence that the HomePod is a massive mainstream hit. Whatever.
5) Bloomberg insists iPhone X sales were weak. Speculation on all sides there, but Apple hasn’t released accurate sales and the X set no sales records. By far the most popular iPhone Apple offered was the 6. So when Bloomberg says “lackluster”, they aren’t totally wrong. Word to the wise: The 8 was a better performing phone than the X.
Once again, AppleInsider demonstrates how huge corporations have yappy noisy little attack dogs on the internet attempting to tear down any criticism of the pristine corporate image. Paid shills at AppleInsider have given no evidence to support their opinions, and of course love to use time shifting to attack past speculation by anyone who sees the world without Apple reality distortion glasses.
Bloomberg is not perfect, and I would not recommend them for tech news in general, but the over the top criticism from Appleinsider is weak and unjustified. If Apple couldn’t refute these 5 ancient stories themselves, then why does Appleinsider and MDN feel the need to go on the war path against Bloomberg now?
It is not on Apple and Amazon, et al, to prove that hardware tampering could not possibly ever take place.
It is on Bloomberg to prove that some tampering did in fact take place.
Some really dodgy things about the story have come to light in the last week, if you’ve followed it. Such as interviews with one of the few named sources in the article, the hardware security consultant.
For example, he said one of the authors has been talking to him for a year trying to understand the hypothetical and theoretical way a hardware hack might occur and what it would look like.
The named consultant is very uncomfortable now: the hypotheticals that he gave, and the image he supplied as an example, turn out, low and behold, to be exactly what allegedly came to pass and what the unnamed sources have allegedly confirmed. What a coincidence.
BTW, it’s not just these 5 Bloomberg stories about Apple that are suspect. The same authors made accusations about a pipeline explosion, and that the NSA used the heartbleed vulnerability to its own advantage for 2 years before the vulnerability became publicly known.
Both stories have raised similar questions about elements of their veracity, and how well the authors understood what they were talking about.