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20060124,02


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More Gibson.

Gibson's been called 'the author of absolutely nothing' and by us. And it's true. It's one thing to proclaim a lot of projects like Bill Gates who was going to improve his 'Traf-O-Data' and never come through but it's quite another to do like Gibson and elevate it to an art.

And Gibson has this way of deferring insight into his game by substituting one project for another when he gets tired of not being capable of doing anything.

He started this big war with Aureate once upon a time as many may remember. And he came out with this incredibly dinky 'OptOut'. It's no longer available, or so he thinks, but Wayback have it all right. And it's been crippled from the start, but there are ways around that too.

The screenshots don't accurately depict what the app does. It attacks a single instance of spyware. That's it. But the screenshots show a program that seems capable of noticing any intrusion - but if you look close you can see it's a constructed image. Making the program work like advertised was beyond the man's meagre capabilities.

So what did he do? Easy: he bowed out to Ad-Aware in a finess made to make it look like he'd helped Lavasoft build their program - and immediately announced a new tool called NetFilter which like the 'commercial' OptOut would cost $24.

Except NetFilter never materialised - of course it didn't - but by then the Jonestown groupies had forgot OptOut anyway.

Talk about covering one's tracks. It can't be a tranquil life to be Steve Gibson.

And then when you look at the 'software' he's been churning out the past years - when anyone with any sense got off Windows - it's obvious he's doing the same thing and at least with his Jonestown groupies he's getting away with it.

1. Use the same program skeleton each time.
2. The program has an RTF control - that's it.
3. Flip or read a bit in the Windows Registry.
4. Display one of two RTF messages depending on the outcome.

That's all he can do. He's yet to write one single non-trivial Windows program in all these years - nine in fact if you count, as he says himself he didn't graduate to GUIs until 1997.

If you do go by that site, bring a barf bag - the self-congratulation and Sesame Street hype is really nauseating. And if you ask how those brown shirts can continue to cling to such a charlatan, ask yourself how JJ could get everyone in Jonestown to drink FlavorAid laced with valium and cyanide.

It's the same diff.

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