cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/34531692
US energy officials have found unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices.
[…]
Reuters reported the presence of undocumented and “rogue” communication devices in a number of Chinese-made solar inverters. These could potentially introduce unregulated and undocumented remote communication channels to the inverters, by which an actor could remotely bypass the cybersecurity firewalls that utility companies use to prevent direct communication back to China.
[…]
Bloomberg isn’t real news. It’s on par with RT News.
No true Scotsman would ever lie about Chinese spy technology.
Reuters is citing “two people familiar with the matter” and people in the US federal government not even speaking through an official announcement. While I trust Reuters not to have made up those people’s words, this does mean that so far the only source is semi-random US government employees.
So it literally is just the word of people working for Trump we’re going on.
And for context, it is quite common for reputable news agencies to misreport things, or to take the word of a government employee as final when they really shouldn’t. I personally saw a video of a car running into a climate action protest1, only for the ‘reputable’ Dutch state news agency (NOS) simply going by the police spokesperson’s statement that the climate activists had scratched the car before it hit them2. But the NOS just said the spokesperson said it, so reputation-wise they were in the clear.
Now I’m not saying the genocidal dictatorship known as the People’s Republic of China is not putting spyware on devices shipped to the west. I’m just saying that we need more than an unofficial statement by an employee working under Trump, even if that statement is being signal boosted by Reuters. Skepticism is warranted.
1: At 48:50 in this livestream, in the left part of the splitscreen. Luckily it was at walking pace so nobody was injured as far as I know.
2: This article, in Dutch.