August 16th, 2007

Gutmann: "I'm going to ignore" questions about Vista FUD

Posted by Ed Bott @ 9:17 am

Categories: Windows Vista

Tags: Word, Note, Microsoft Windows Vista, Ed Bott

If you’re waiting for Peter Gutmann to reply to my questions or those of my ZDNet colleague George Ou about his confusing, contradictory, and inflammatory Windows Vista “research,” I’ve got some bad news. A note posted by the New Zealand encryption researcher sometime in the last 24 hours (it wasn’t there at 5:15AM PDT yesterday) says fuggedaboutit:

Unlike George, ZDNet isn’t paying me to do this stuff and I really have better things to do with my time so I’m going to pretty much ignore it, I just added this note in case people had seen one of his rants and were wondering what the story was.

The irony is rich, of course. Gutmann had the time to write more than 7,000 words on the subject last December, add another 3,000 words in January, many of them dripping with sarcasm. He had the time to add another 14,000 words in the intervening months. When Microsoft prepared a response, he had the time to compare them to Nazis and violent street criminals. The organizers of the Usenix Security Symposium invited Gutmann to speak at their event in Northern California Boston last week, and he had the time to prepare 132 PowerPoint slides; then he had the time to fly halfway around the world to give that talk. He’s had the time to update the notes at the top of his website at least three times this week alone.

But a couple of bloggers point out the ridiculous errors in his column and ask for some explanations, and he “has better things to do with his time”?

Maybe they do things differently in the Southern Hemisphere, but where I come from, that’s called “slinking away with your tail between your legs.”

I hope every publication that picked up this ludicrous story will run a follow-up noting the complete collapse of Gutmann’s claims.