You can be as harsh as you need without being a dick. Just address the content and what's wrong with it, not how stupid you think the author is. On the very rare occasion that it's useful to talk about someone's intelligence, you should say more than "you're an idiot".

Maybe you're not aware that in English there is a difference between saying "You're an idiot." and "This is idiocy."

I don't want to get into an argument about definitions or semantics. Those phrases are different, but they come across similarly to me and many others, at least in this context. That's really all that matters in a casual discussion like this.

I understand not everyone will have the same reaction. I don't pretend to speak for everyone, but I suspect I speak for the majority.

Lying in your paper is being a dick

>Author here, I would like to set the record straight.

>We do not claim to have an attack on SSDs.

but in the paper:

>>"We assume that the victim system runs a filesystem on top of MLC NAND flash-based SSD."

You're right. If the author lied, say that. Don't just say "idiocy".

Also, those sentences aren't contradictory. "Note that this result does not depend on whether you are using an SSD, a disk, or any other storage for your filesystem." Meaning the attack might apply to someone using an SSD, but the SSD has nothing to do with the vulnerability. It is useful to precisely define a model case in the paper so your results can be easily reproduced, even if some details are not required to demonstrate the vulnerability.

Why is intensity at all relevant? Are ad-hominem attacks fair-play? The original poster called this 'idiocy' - is that an engineering term? This isn't about trying not to "make someone sad" - the OP has gone much further than "making someone sad".

Because "I disagree with this" is semantically different from "this is stupid". They communicate different ideas. You can disagree with something without thinking it's stupid. A reader can and probably should react differently to a post being intelligent, but wrong, versus being just plain idiotic.

The post on question also didn't call the author an idiot, just said that the paper was idiocy. That's not ad hominem at all.