[conspire] 21st century web platforms

[paulz at ieee.org]

 I've been puzzling over why Gibson and others achieve celebrity status anyway.
Old saying, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

Too many people don't apply critical thinking.  They assume that because Gibson uses a lot of jargon, Gibson must be smart.  Smarter than the audience member who can't understand the BS.  And the audience tunes into the next session with the belief that they might understand it.

The proper response should be to find someone actually knows the subject and present it clearly.


   On Sunday, February 16, 2020, 8:51:37 PM PST, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:  
 
 Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I decided to give a listen to the show.  I don't pretend to be
> anything like a security expert and was hoping I might learn
> something.

If you want to learn more about security, there are _excellent_ places
to do so, but sadly Leo Laporte's show on the subject, despite him being
an urbane radio host, is almost certainly not among them.  It's, as you
suggest, a news digest show, and the biggest problem is that neither
Laporte nor Mr. Gibson his (apparently frequent) guest commenter
actually understands the subject.

     (snip)

> Anyway, you can list me as another person who is extremely
> underwhelmed by Mr. Gibson.  I would have preferred a random video of
> cats.

Gibson popped up as a sudden software celebrity and frequent speaker in
the 1980s, back when I was one of the newsletter staff at Diablo PC User
Group in Walnut Creek.  Gibson's firm Gibson Research Corporation
(grc.com) suddenly showed up in 1985.  His big first moneymaker was a
hard disk utility called Spinrite (1988), which claimed to do all sorts
of magic things to make hard disks more reliable and improve their
durability and performance, and in reality Spinrite in its heyday was
practically a one-trick pony:  It tested MFM-type hard drives to find
the best-performing interleave setting, and then (destructively; i.e.,
you'll need to restore from backup) rewrote the low-level formatting
information with the new interleave factor.  

  
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