I don't have time to dig through the messages, but at a glance only two are particularly worthwhile: hdyoung, "standard spycraft," and XXongo, "Did you actually read the article?" Most of the rest merely demonstrate the validity of Mao's famous comment, "The Capitalists will buy the rope we use to hang them and put it around their own necks."

The Bloomberg article is as extraordinary as claiming that a brick fell when someone dropped it. Beijing's intel community takes advantage of every opportunity others give them, without exception. We gave them the biggest in history when we allowed our computer/internet/etc. industries to depend on Chinese chip and board manufacturers. Imagining that they could have overlooked or neglected something so tasty ignores too many years of experience with them.

One critique of the article below did make a valid point. None of the companies that might have been affected by Supermicro boards has copped to the problem. This is adequately explained by the habitual secrecy of our own intelligence community, which simply didn't tell them, and by the existence of corporate lawyers. At each company, the first person to suggest going public with this triggered the obvious scream, "Are you insane?!!!" The idea died there.

I first saw this kind of hazard mentioned by a prominent forecaster in 2005 +/- a year. It's long past time the rest of us caught up, and particularly those of us in the industries most directly affected by the problem.