There's no dishonesty. They are easily found for anyone interested. As I said the horse been has beaten to death so I didn't want to do what I was discouraging others from doing.

They are mostly uneducated, lazy, decade-old, hand-wavy, and baseless personal attacks on him.

The man has been a geek, engineer, programmer and a techie for multiple decades.

He has been on record for the past 12-13 years audio, video and text transcripts, 2-3 hours per week, discussing many topics in detail, explaining his thoughts and ideas and reasoning carefully (on SecurityNow podcast, 600+ episodes!).

Every time he has made a mistake he comes back and carefully corrects himself, and it doesn't happen often either.

He is no Linus Torvalds, and he doesn't claim to be one, most of us aren't either.

And his knowledge goes into all sorts of weird corners from science fiction to medicine like the vitamin D stuff and the "sleep formula".

All of it available for free for anyone who has the patience to sit through it and learn. I have, and he has improved my life in many ways that I owe him for and can never pay back (including starting to take vitamin D many years ago after he talked about as I have referred to).

He has contributed positively to this community and industry for many years. He has done nothing to deserve people bringing up stupid pages that call him a "charlatan" or "snake oil salesman" every time someone calls his name.

There isn't even any substance to those claims. Most of them say "he said XP raw sockets were bad!! GET HIM!!".

Or variations of "Spinrite doesn't fix prostate cancer. It must be snake oil software.".

He has probably explained 10+ hours on SecurityNow the history behind Spinrite, what it does, what it doesn't, why it works, where it works, where it doesn't work and everything in between.

But these bitter 20-something neckbeards are too busy for that. Let's jump the man that has been a programmer for longer than you have existed because he uses assembly or something ... GET HIM!

I have no horse in this race. I'm just angry at the smug reply that inevitably follows every time him or his pages/products/projects are mentioned.

As if everyone needs to be warned about this monster of a man for the unimaginable sins he committed 10+ years ago when he said something about XP raw sockets, or something else.

If these people criticising him had produced a tenth of the content that he has produced they would have made many more mistakes.

What are we to do now? Crucify Gibson because his Spinrite software doesn't perform miracles? Or because he has made a few mistakes here and there? Everyone else is perfect?

Are we going to dig up the past history of everyone else who is mentioned too? And link to a page that enumerates the minor mistakes they have made over their entire career?

Go dig up Github commits to shame people who introduced stupid bugs in open source software? (not that he has, just an example)

Or how about we dig through their medium posts, conference presentations, and list and archive any possible mistakes.

Then every time someone mentions them say "HEY LOOK EVERY BODY THIS PERSON HAS MADE 3 WHOLE MISTAKES SINCE 10 YEARS AGO, THEY ARE CLEARLY A MONSTER! STAY FAR AWAY.".

It is completely uncalled for and has gotten real old.

He doesn't come here to write something like this himself so I had to do it for him.

Steve, if you ever read this, thank you for your work.

Edit: fixed some typos, added some additional sentences