Steve Gibson’s SpinRite program has been broken for the entirety of this decade. It doesn’t run on modern machines which use AHCI to access the hard drive and instead requires legacy ATA. It doesn’t work under UEFI and instead requires a legacy BIOS.
For these reasons, it literally does not run on modern computers. People who still swear by the snake oil program must keep old computers around for the specific purpose of running the Dumbo feather program.
Steve Gibson needs Security Now as his vehicle to keep a stream of new customers coming to buy his now-useless program. With the pittance that Leo pays Steve, he says in his own words this is literally the only reason he continues doing Security Now.
“Leo pays me so little that I pay Elaine more than half of what I receive from TWiT. And if it were not for my ability to keep SpinRite alive through the podcast, this would never have been a viable use of my time.”
— Steve Gibson, July 7, 2017
As you saw in the video at the top of the post, Steve has resorted to reusing testimonials, presumably because no new ones can come in, because the program physically cannot run on modern machines.
What’s shocking is that he pretended to have never heard of the blog post, the “KSOD”, or any of the rest of it. Steve dishonestly presents each reading of the testimonial as if it was a new testimonial that just came in.
The Total Drama Scholarly Research Team set out to find other examples, and they were found easily. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are some examples of testimonial re-use.
- Security Now 622 and 481
- Security Now 600 and 333
- Security Now 456 and 312
- Security Now 599 and 334
- The research team was too frustrated to continue after finding this many examples.
In the interest of allowing Steve Gibson to explain himself, we requested comment from him on this article. He did not reply. We then requested comment again in his SQRL newsgroup. He did not reply.
Thanks to BillEverlasting in our chat room for giving us the initial tip for this story. Submit your own tips to help us find stories we may have missed!
We fully expect many of these links to disappear, but we have archived everything in case. Let us know in the comments if he starts deleting anything.
