These get trotted out every time Gibson is mentioned in any capacity. For the most part, this stuff is 2+ decades old. It feels like character assassination because it's written exclusively as "debunking" or calling out Gibson's missteps. It makes no effort to followup and state if he's corrected himself, changed his opinion or shared further information. These folks have it out for this guy - whether or not he's wrong.

Regarding character assassination and those links: walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

Some people has a feud with Gibson 20 years ago for what looks like the old days of feuds in Internet Security where you either a "good" hacker hacking stuff for fun or you were a bad sellout earning money with security products.

If this sounds ridiculous check "project mayhem hackers" on Google, it was peak juvenile rebellion.

I have checked once those links and it all looked like just people ranting about misunderstandings and different opinions but taking the side that they had the perfect understanding and the perfect opinions... an immature approach I would say.

It's two decades old, but so is the stuff on his site.

Go look at Shields Up - it's all written like people are still plugging their computers directly into their DSL modems and cablemodems. I couldn't find a single acknowledgement that his service isn't necessary for 99% of users on the internet who are behind a NAT router. Nor does he acknowledge that most ISP's have long since adopted policies of blocking traffic on common windows network service port numbers.

Anyone behind a NAT router doesn't need to worry about any of this unless they've modified its configuration to forward some ports.

He's also now hawking spinrite for people with SSDs, claiming it helps their reliability. It's complete nonsense.

For what it's worth, the FAQ has a section about NAT. If you click on 'Help' it also specifically mentions the use case of: "... checking and verifying your NAT router's WAN-side security..."

Indeed, would not love to see my list of mistakes over the decades, especially putting on a live show. The perfect-forward-podcast will not ever exist.

Bullshit. You can go to the GRC website and forums to see that he has never changed his opinion on the snake oil of Spinrite for modern drives. And the very fact that he continues to sell something with claims that cannot possibly be true for modern (past 30 years) hard drives (not to mention SSDs) is alone enough evidence.

I cannot read his mind. But my guess is that he actually believes a lot of the nonsense he is spouting, it isn’t malice. That doesn’t make him any less of a crackpot though.

Can you give some specific example of a claim that "cannot possibly be true" and explain why? And please do not just post links to an article by someone else, because I'm interested what claim you have found incorrect and what was your string of checks and arguments to that belief.