What bothers me most about this article is that it's based around what "Super Micro says" -- why would I care about what Supermicro says? They are the ones being accused of having backdoors in their chips.
I would've liked to hear this directly from the company doing the audit, without Super Micro's own "interpretation".
The second thing that bothers me about this story is that it was Supermicro that paid for the audit. Maybe there was no one else going to do it, or maybe they just thought to get ahead of anyone else trying to review their chips. I don't know, but it doesn't sit well with me.
Only recently we saw at least two major tech companies skirt FCC's privacy monitoring by paying themselves for the audits: Google and Facebook. Both had multiple major privacy scandals in the past couple of years, but somehow all of these privacy issues were completely missed by the companies auditing them.
"A person familiar with the analysis told Reuters it had been conducted by global firm Nardello & Co and that customers could ask for more detail on that company’s findings."
So I guess yes you can bypass Super Micro if you're a customer.
I saw that, but it's not nearly enough. Why isn't the report made public? Why do we have to take Super Micro's word for it?
I seem to remember a very hostile and skeptical attitude from HN against Binance doing exactly this sort of thing when they announced the results of their paid-for "audit" of Tether financials. Why aren't we treating Super Micro's report of the audit the same way?
I would've liked to hear this directly from the company doing the audit, without Super Micro's own "interpretation".
The second thing that bothers me about this story is that it was Supermicro that paid for the audit. Maybe there was no one else going to do it, or maybe they just thought to get ahead of anyone else trying to review their chips. I don't know, but it doesn't sit well with me.
Only recently we saw at least two major tech companies skirt FCC's privacy monitoring by paying themselves for the audits: Google and Facebook. Both had multiple major privacy scandals in the past couple of years, but somehow all of these privacy issues were completely missed by the companies auditing them.