Steve Gibson

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For other people named Steve Gibson see Steve Gibson (disambiguation)

Steve Gibson (born March 1955) is a computer enthusiast, software engineer and journalist based in Laguna Hills, California. Gibson founded Gibson Research Corporation in 1985, and is currently its primary of three employees.

Gibson studied EECS at UC Berkeley.

1 Works
2 Media
3 Criticism
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Works

Gibson has had a very long career in the technology field starting in his teen years. He began in hardware projects but moved more towards software development in the 1980s.

Gibson is an advocate of assembly language programming, and prides himself on writing whole applications exclusively in assembly language, including the SpinRite hard disk utility. He is one of several advocates of optimizing computer programs and reducing the size of their executables.

In the 1990s, Gibson began to move into the computer security field, developing and distributing a number of security tools, including the ShieldsUp! port-scanner, and the LeakTest firewall tester. In 2000, Gibson created one of the first adware removal programs, OptOut.

Gibson is also credited for first coining the term "Spyware" in reference to advertising software.^[1]

[edit] Media

Steve Gibson is a contributing editor to InfoWorld magazine. His writings provide something of a glimpse into the world of hackers and crackers, of which he counts himself one of the former.

Gibson has appeared on Leo Laporte's technology podcast, This Week in Tech in mid-2005. Gibson also co-hosts a computer security-focused podcast with Laporte called Security Now!.

In April 2006, Gibson made an acting appearance alongside technology columnist John C. Dvorak in the video podcast Up in Smoke.

[edit] Criticism

Gibson has generated controversy by taking independent, unusual or unique positions on significant and complex security and other technical issues, perhaps with a tendency towards self-promotion. He is a contentious figure even among his fellow InfoWorld columnists.^[2] A website named GRCsucks.com was regularly maintained between 2001 and 2004.

Notable examples of controversial claims Gibson has made:

Wrote an original IP protocol in 2000,^[3] and claimed to have been unaware of SYN cookies, a very similar and technically superior invention of professor Daniel Bernstein four years earlier.^[4] Supported by Linux since 1997, syncookies are widely known among programmers interested in the field.
Stated that raw sockets in Windows XP could be the "enabling factor for the creation of a series of 'Ultimate Weapons' against which the fundamentally trusting architecture of the global Internet currently has no effective defense".^[5] Fyodor, the author of Nmap, argued that disabling raw sockets would solve nothing.^[6] Microsoft removed them in its Service Pack 2 update after the Blaster worm exploited it.
Noted that the Windows Metafile vulnerability was intentionally engineered into Windows by Microsoft as a feature making Windows Metafiles more flexible.^[7] Gibson also suggested in episode 22 of his Security Now podcast that Microsoft's reason for patching the vulnerability may have been due to an "industrious hacker" who found out about it and had been using it for financial gain.^[8]