[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Apple CANCELLED its order for 30,000 servers in 2015 when it discovered they contained the motherboards that had this "tiny spy chip" in them, avoiding the spying problem.

Apple certainly is in a position to do this, and I certainly want to believe that they did - so I think I will.

I’m more worried about someone inserting unwanted logic inside a chip. Seems like in principle that could be hard to detect via testing.

[roadcat]

I’m more worried about someone inserting unwanted logic inside a chip. Seems like in principle that could be hard to detect via testing.

True, hard to detect. Before I retired, I worked as an IT senior systems engineer. Several decades ago, I wrote custom machine code for IBM mainframes I maintained at my job that controlled the flow of thousands of programs that ran. I secretly embedded code that gave my programs top priority over everything else running. Many years after I left that department, my code was still running and no one detected it (despite a dozen other engineers working on the systems code). And no one would unless specifically testing with the trigger code I used to enable it. Lots of programmers did this sort of stuff for fun, because they could - nothing malicious.

It's different now, with governments doing it for malicious reasons.

[mrsmith]

“I certainly want to believe that they did - so I think I will. “

Might as well. When it comes to “spy stuff” it’s best to just assume all public knowledge is false. Those that know bever tell.