[Zhang Fei]

Very, very impressive, and reminiscent of sophisticated US intelligence operations (including the Soviet pipeline sabotage of the 80's). Expect foreign electronics manufacturers to decamp en masse from their Chinese plants. Supermicro, the publicly-listed manufacturer at the center of this disaster, is being quoted at almost half the price it was yesterday. It will probably go bust.

[Gen-X-Dad]

Back in the 90s, every globalist free trader insisted that having China take over the manufacturing of electronics would not compromise national security. They insisted that people who were concerned about national security and strategic economic control vs. profit is the only thing that matters were stupid and wrong. Trump is destroying the economic strip mining of America by globalists which is why they despise him and want to remove him.

[Swordmaker]

Apple was going to use the hardware in their iTunes Streaming video/movie service they were installing back in 2015-2016 order 30,000 rack mounted servers from Elemental Systems who had their servers made by Supermicro. However, even Bloomberg BusinessNews states that Apple cancelled the order when their engineers discovered the malicious IC chip on the motherboard of test units they received.

The more I think about this the less sense it makes for several very good reasons.

1. Both Amazon and Apple supposedly discovered this malicious IC chip in 2015, three years ago.
2. Nothing was said about it in any security bulletin to the industry warning about security problems with servers made in China.
3. IN THREE YEARS! Seriously?
4. Software could have been developed to disable or block transmission of the stolen data back to China since it was known. Really? The URL of the target server had to be available.
5. The revelation about this malicious chip comes from a single main stream media news source which cites only anonymous sources both in the impacted government and the two major companies, Amazon and Apple, the two largest companies in the world by market cap. Yet we hear crickets.
6. Other companies are vaguely mentioned but not by name.
7. Amazon, Apple, and Supermicro vigorously deny any such chip exists and that any such events happened.
8. Amazon acquired Elemental Systems in late 2015 and continued ordering Supermicro servers for use in their Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud and for Amazon Prime streaming video / movie service
9. AWS CEO independently said there were no spurious hardware installed in or on the Supermicro motherboards.
10. Apple did not break off doing business with Supermicro until sometime in 2016, selecting another supplier, perhaps due to the increased demand Amazon was placing on Supermicro due to growth of Amazon Prime.
11. Altering the design of a motherboard to add another chip is not an easy thing to due and must be done from engineering on. . . especially on a multilayered board.
12. None of the articles have shown this IC chip in situ on a motherboard, instead they show a photo of a generic miniature grain of wheat chip perched on a finger tip. Why not show one in situ?
13. No one has described how this tiny chip accomplishes what it accomplishes with the various scenarios a server environments that might be encountered. It just is.
14. The denial by both Apple management and Amazon management is backed by the fact that they face penalties if they are lying imposed by the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 which imposes PERSONAL fines of from $10 million to $20 million and imprisonment in a Federal institution for ten to twenty years. What incentive do these managers and officers have to lie. In Apple's case, they never even USED the products involved, cancelling the order.
15. Bloomberg has published FAKE NEWS before.

Given all that, something here doesn't smell right. . . my BS o'meter is almost pegged at 100%!