Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is the scale at play with the Supermicro story.

If the story is that a small handful of motherboards that were destined to be shipped to cloud providers from Supermicro had some remote monitoring / control capabilities (of varying types opportunistically applied) added to them at the behest of the Chinese government that sounds completely plausible and incredibly hard to verify and/or defend against.

I say plausible as we know that US intelligence agencies have conducted similar actions:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

And that's without even direct access to the manufacturing floor (as in the Supermicro case).

Even if the number of boards was small, there should be some form of tangible proof instead of them just going off statements of unverified "sources".

I haven't read a single bloomberg article since they published that story. Journalistic integrity is very important to me.

What if all extant examples of these boards are in some NSA laboratory? Bloomberg could plausibly have sources that know of the boards but don't have the ability to steal one of the boards for Bloomberg.

(Emphasis on plausibly, which is not the same as probably.)

Why are you saying it is a hoax?

A hoax implies they made it up. Instead they have multiple sources giving similar stories, in an area that is shrouded in secrecy of both the corporate and national security kind.

It's hard to report in this area: people can't and won't go on the record, motivations can be murky and very technical details are extremely important.

However, the parts that can be verified are easily verifiable, the technical details seem realistic and the motivations align.

It's possible that the story is wrong, but hoax seems to be the wrong way to think about this.

Any guesses to why aren't Super Micro or other affected parties taking legal action, if it was a hoax like what's reported in this case?

Because the bar is really high if they’re a news outlet. You have to prove that they knew what they were saying was false, and did it with the intent to harm.

Besides, I’m sure SuperMicro just wants it to blow over and be done with it. Being in the news for a lawsuit will bring it up again and possibly harm them financially as people (managers who order) who don’t understand things have knee jerk reactions.

Doesn’t torte law cover cases of stating things as fact that ended up untrue, which caused harm?

Being in the news several more times for a case about "spy chips" in your hardware isn't worth any money they'd get?

Bingo. Fighting it would just preserve the Streisand effect. There doesn't appear to have been any material impact from where I sit, and there haven't been any further stories along the same lines.

Large commercial lawsuits are like investment, you invest precious resources into a lawsuit that may or may not pay off.

It's entirely reasonable for a company to decide that it's not worth the investment and not pursue.

And to refer back to this article, it's the French AMF fined Bloomberg, Vinci only had to file a complaint, not a full lawsuit with teams of lawyers.

If Super Micro knows they didn’t do it, they should absolutely love the story. Buyback the underpriced shares and make a ton of free money once the market realized the Bloomberg story is false. I don’t know if they actually did that, but that’s what I would have done. I didn’t actually do that because I trusted Bloomberg a lot. But there was substantial profit to be made as an insider. I bet many/most employees made that trade, at the very least.

It could also be the case that it never happened but Super Micro doesn't know for certain that it never happened. They may be pretty sure it never happened but unable to rule out the possibility that some portion of their organization was compromised by an intelligence agency.

Would that be legal, or counted as insider trading? Since you're trading on relevant information not available to the public.

I assume if the company publicly denied the accusations it would not be considered insider trading

You can’t steal from your own company, so it’s fine. You have to tell investors that you didn’t do it though.

Generally, when a company doesn't sue over something like this, it's because they don't have a case. And that always means that enough of the allegations are true that they couldn't win an absolutely massive judgement in court.

Because in the US, truth is an absolute defense to the defamation torts. (The same is not truth in the UK; you can still be liable for defamation even if everything you said is true. See, e.g., the case of the Nazi-fetishist MP.)

The Streisand effect is not a thing companies worry about. Because more brand damage = more monetary damages to collect.