steve gibson
Steve Gibson - What do Steve Gibson, Hugh Loebner, and Dave Winer, and Sam Sloan have in common? I don’t know actually, but there seems to be a common thread in the personalites that is fascinating. Maybe an ETP with equal parts N and S? Personality categorization systems can’t really grasp subtle nuances, though. Some things just don’t have names.
Anyway (now talking only about Steve), Steve Gibson gets a lot of grief from security experts for his commentary about various security issues. If you read his site without knowing much about security, you’ll think the sky is falling. If you read it and you know a great deal about security, you might quickly decide to flip the bozo-bit and assume he is completely ignorant. But if you have spent a lot of time thinking about how Internet security can be improved for normal users at home, you have to appreciate the amount of effort he has put into his stuff. There are a lot of good ideas described on the site, and in many cases he has done the work to try to make these programs available for non-technical users. People can criticize the tools for not being “professional” enough, but at least Steve is writing and shipping code that works. He targets the complete novice user. He may have some strange and strong opinions, but he seems to be attacking exactly the right problem, and is one of very few people who are actually working on it. Why aren’t more people working on stuff like this? Why is it that a good idea posted on Steve’s site just rots while he is busy toying with other things, and nobody else runs with it (or gives him funding to hire people to develop it)?