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Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by ay on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @10:34PM (#34799777)
FWIW, he’s been at it for about 20 years.
Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by killjoywashere on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @11:00PM (#34799945)
> he’s been at it for about 20 years.

At least. I remember finding his site back in 2004 and it felt long in the tooth then. Complete with blink tags.

Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by pdonis on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @11:57PM (#34800263)
Gibson Research Corporation was founded in 1985. I can remember seeing references to articles of his in the late 1980s on Compuserve.
Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by heleninboodler on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @02:40PM (#34809456)
One of his most infamous crusades was how he yelled about Windows XP raw sockets -- a fake problem that he hyped up as if the sky was falling -- well after Windows XP was EOL'd.
Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by timbit42 on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @07:12PM (#34812987)
What is your source for this "information"?

He brought it up in 2001, the year XP was released[1]. Microsoft fixed it three years later in SP2. XP was EOL'ed in 2009[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Gibson_(computer_program...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by heleninboodler on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @08:08PM (#34813546)
My apologies for misstating this. According to the internet archive, he stopped complaining about this problem sometime in 2008, a mere four years after the raw sockets restrictions were added to XP.

Do keep in mind, however, that his entire reason for continuing to publicize this was because it allowed him to continue making foolish claims like "Microsoft Does Not Understand Security," and to pretend that the eventual restrictions (not removal) of raw sockets in XP were proof that he was right. They were not.

In fact, the entire issue was over his own misunderstanding of security. You can't secure a network by asking client operating systems to restrict their own behavior on some kind of honor system (guess what: the bad guys' computers will not have these restrictions). The use of raw sockets did not disappear and the internet still exists. The claim that this was "a tremendous threat to the global Internet" basically amounted to "the sky is falling and only I can see it because none of the other security experts 'get it' like I do." Which is entirely bogus.

Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by SixDouble5321 on Thursday February 16, 2023 @03:17AM (#34816283)
I always imagine all the Gibson haters are still stuck on this drama from the XP days. Not sure why it was so polarizing, but for what it's worth I don't think "Microsoft understands security." It's not any one person or one thing, it's the culture. It's the laissez-faire attitude. It's the lack of investment. And the ubiquity of their software compounds all of it.
Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by heleninboodler on Thursday February 16, 2023 @02:56PM (#34824903)
> I always imagine all the Gibson haters are still stuck on this drama from the XP days.

Has he done anything of note since? I mean, other than the extremely timely spinrite podcast? Honest question; I browsed through the website and it still seems to be mostly filled with questionable security alarmism from the 200x era.

Re:Gibson Research Corporation's Ultra-High Entropy Pseudo-R... by SixDouble5321 on Friday February 17, 2023 @04:45AM (#34832757)
SQRL and SpinRite are current, and his main works. SpinRite has a new version on the horizon supporting UEFI.

Shields Up is timeless, but doesn't do IPv6 and probably never will. There are some smaller apps that were done recently, less notably. Security Now podcast is ongoing.