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M$ Bott & Billy Rubin

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No it's not 'bot' - it's 'bott'. Or 'Bott'. Bots are actually smarter. This one is really stupid. Begging for attention at The Technological.

Forget the Thurrotts; forget the Enderles: they're probably too battle weary by now. Defeat is strangely debilitating. Time for the back ranks to push forward. And have they ever found an idiot this time around.

Ed Bott's been sent out to disintegrate Peter Gutmann. Who is Ed Bott? Better to ask first who Peter Gutmann is.

Peter Gutmann - DOCTOR Peter Gutmann PhD - is a professor in computer science at the University of Auckland. His fields of research include security architecture, security usability, and hardware security. Peter's discovered numerous flaws in crypto systems and protocols; has developed the cryptlib open source library; and has contributed to PGP2.

For some he's best known for his stellar analysis in the paper 'Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory' shattering the myths surrounding document shredding and pointing the way to the only method (short of incineration) capable of adequately securing secondary storage devices - a method today used by Apple (albeit somewhat clumsily).

Peter's homepage reads like an advanced course in computer science. In a word: he's a luminary.

Peter's also known for his exhaustive research into Bill Gates and the DRM Gates is today putting in his 'operating systems'. If you haven't yet read his awesome 'study' on the subject, take a week and do it now. It'll open your eyes and change your life for the better.

But this is where M$ Bott comes in. No one's really sure how he got through the door but he seems to have a BLOG over at ZD (and that says it all). And he also seems to be peddling BOOKS on WINDOWS (and that says it all again).

But how about his background?

According to PC World he's a 'former PC World editor and prolific book author' with one book currently available. And if you risk a visit to his website he will ask you 'buy my books PLEASE!'

And here's an excerpt from Ed's homepage. So you can see what a guru he's not. [Actually it's rather pathetic.]

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<title>Ed Bott - Windows, Office, and Digital Media Expertise</title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<meta name="Microsoft Border" content="none, default">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="15;url=http://www.edbott.com/weblog">
</head>

Bott's gone in for Gutmann in a serious way. It's something like Woody Allen trying to knock Mike Tyson out. In the one corner: the awesome Peter Gutmann, internationally recognised guru; in the other corner - Ed M$ Bott??!??

No matter as any student of modern day propaganda can attest. Make the headlines BIG and write LOTS and LOTS. And so in a series of seriously demented articles that seemingly have no end the M$ Bott pot goes after the Gutmann kettle.

There's no end to the stupidity but one example can be entertaining. Take a quote where M$ Bott quotes the NZ PhD.

In order to prevent active attacks device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware every 30ms for digital outputs and every 150 ms for analog ones to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system a mass of assorted drivers have to wake up 30 times a second just to ensure that nothing continues to happen. - Peter Gutmann

M$ Bott ties right into that - and right away demonstrates his staggering incompetence.

Wow, polling the underlying hardware every 30 ms? What a taxing demand on a modern PC! That's more than 30 separate instructions that have to be processed every single second! - M$ Bott

And Bott is right: it is more than 30 separate instructions every single second. M$ Bott, clueless as he is, has no clue what a 'computer instruction' is. As in it's not something like 'save my FrontPage file to disk' as in it's instead something on the order of 'shift register blah-blah two bits left check for zero branch to address blah-blah' but only after #1) taking on the interrupt to do this; #2) enacting any 'context switch' related stuff; #3) putting what you can't run now in your deferred procedure call; #4) interacting with the services manager; #5 and so on; #6) and so on; #7) and so on.

Coupled with all the other skulduggery Gates has going on in there. [Remember Win2K and later use 35% CPU just to idle.]

And that's a FUCK OF A LOT of 'instructions'. Probably so many Ed Bott can't count that high.

Billy Rubin

M$ Bott, it's been contended, is good friends with Billy Rubin. Billy's full name is '3-[2-[(3-(2-carboxyethyl)-5-[(3-ethenyl-4-methyl-5-oxo-pyrrol-2-ylidene)methyl]-4-methyl-1H-pyrrol-2-yl]methyl)-5-[(4-ethenyl-3-methyl-5-oxo-pyrrol-2-ylidene)methyl]-4-methyl-1H-pyrrol-3-yl] propanoic acid'. You can call him 'C33H36N4O6' for short.

Billy's what makes the white tip of M$ Bott's nose turn brown.

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