Probably someone panicked about another overheating iPhone battery....
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/29/iphone_6s_plus_overheat/
Apple's European headquarters in Cork, Ireland were evacuated this morning after threatening emails were received by the company. Up to 4,000 workers were rushed out of the premises in Hollyhill and Lavitts Quay, reported the Irish Independent, which said it believed that the Model Farm Road location was also evacuated as a …
Well, eBay, PayPal, IBM. Facebook, Microsoft etc are in Dublin. Maybe Google too.
Intel are in Shannon and Leixlip.
Apple are in Cork, the #2 city.
Analog Devices are in Limerick and Cork
Uber (are they tech at all? or a hackney service) are in Limerick (approx #3 city, though Galway might be #3 or #4 depending how you measure)
Dell moved from Limerick to Poland for bigger grants.
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"it was the threat of paying taxes which really caused the panic evacuation."
It's widely known that Apple have got a special deal which results in them barely paying taxes (in Ireland and elsewhere).
As a logical consequence surely they should barely get any police response (in Ireland and elsewhere).
<tinfoil_hat_time location="firmly on noggin">
Thought it was only paranoia if it wasn't actually true...
Seems exactly the kind of stunt these guys would pull to gain unfettered access for a while. Especially since Apple won't publicly play ball on end-to-end encryption.
</tinfoil_hat_time>
So how's that dragnet working out, lads? Since the hoax was sent by email, isn't this exactly the naughtiness your all-encompassing bulk collection programmes are meant to be flagging? Or will it be flagged some time next month when you've finally had enough time to filter the kilobyte of wheat from petabytes of chaff...
They don't turn off their security cameras during an evacuation, so they couldn't go in without any chance of detection.
Also, Apple makes iMacs at Cork. You can't change the hardware manufacturing to plant a bug in each one that comes off the line even with physical access for half a day, the best you could do is planting a bug in the ones that were on the line at the time. But it would be MUCH easier to intercept the shipment once it leaves Apple and you can target the particular one ISIS is buying or whatever to bug, rather than trying to do them en masse in a shotgun approach hoping to get the one that matters.
Anyway, a software bug is better, as it can be later removed and leave no trace. Surely the NSA has OS X zero days to go along with its zero days on every other OS known to man.
"You can't change the hardware manufacturing to plant a bug in each one that comes off the line even with physical access for half a day,"
Do the processors in these iMacs have functionality equivalent to Intel vPro (disabled or otherwise)?
If it does, then you don't need any extra hardware to "plant a bug in each one that comes off the line".
In fact even without something like vPro you can surely plant a bug in each one simply by making a few suitable changes to the firmware, no? I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of the NSA and friends.