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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

AMI is a firmware company so you'd check the hash of the BMC flash contents.

Although it would be much (much) more elaborate, a counterfeit BMC could have hidden ROMs or bootloaders capable of opening backdoors into running machines.

Note that the BMC chip comes from a different company (ASPEED) who has not been implicated in this "stickergate".

perhaps off-topic, but where does the -gate suffix come from? It seems it can be replaced by "troubles".

Gamer troubles. Sticker troubles. But what does -gate even mean?

I think it comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal

Ah, good old Watergate-gate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_%22-gate%22_scandals_a...

This is covered by the Wikipedia articles others have linked, but briefly: Richard Nixon (US President from 1969-1974) was forced to resign by the revelation that he had paid for criminals to break into the Democratic Party's campaign headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. The entire affair became known as Watergate.

Later, one of Nixon's former speechwriters, William Safire, propagated the use of -gate as a generic suffix for any type of scandal, notably including very minor ones. It's likely that part of why he did this was to retrospectively diminish the perceived seriousness of the Watergate scandal.

Have you heard about the gategate?

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/gategate-its-...

Meta-grumble: I am so tired of "-gate" being added to "controversy names". It continues to lose cultural relevance (as evidenced by your post) yet it hangs on.

> It continues to lose cultural relevance (as evidenced by your post)

Huh? How much cultural relevance do you expect words to have? The only word in your comment you could even make a case for is the "meta-".

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