@YetAnotherRandomUser I think you're probably talking about me. I downvoted a few different answers which recommended listening to Steve Gibson, a few of which were yours. Note that I have also upvoted at least one of your answers, so re-wise, you still had a net gain in reputation. I am not trying to downvote your answers in particular, only answers which promote snake oil.

Regarding "insisting that it is fact", I suspect you will not find that many people see Gibson in a positive light (mandatory attrition link). Getting a few downvotes on low-quality or bad answers is certainly not serial downvoting. Of course, I could be mistaken and you are talking about a completely different event.

@YetAnotherRandomUser voting practically is "as you see fit"

Some people hardly, if ever downvote, some downvote lots. But its about targetting rather than content.

And in theory, if its a pattern, the system will catch it.

Practically? I just look at my posts, try to improve them and hope it works

which has more or less worked for me

Exactly as @JourneymanGeek says. I am a rather critical person and I downvote a lot, but I am not targeting anyone in particular. I explained the issues I had with your posts and linked to resources that can, at the very least, explain why the security community tends to dislike GRC. There's not much more I can do.

I hardly if ever downvote

hullo

hallo

I may interest you that I much appreciate 'your' monkey 'meme': chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/43472489#43472489 .

uh

good for you?

@TomK. It's just a convoluted way of socialising and saying thanks.

Ohai. I'm just dropping by. I'm not particularly interested in practical security (apart from the 'common sense' 'day to day' stuff), although I do like reading an answer here once in a while. I do like to follow the progress of crypto, in particular those of the researchers at my university (Eindhoven).

heh okay

As for the whole downvoting thing: don't worry about receiving downvotes. I have a -7 question on meta for which I still have a net gain on reputation ;)

problem is, nobody of us can really say "you're welcome", because that person who made that post in the first place isn't too active any more

Ah well, there may be people who are interested in the proliferation of memes.

I thought meta doesn't affect rep.

@forest Site meta doesn't, but Meta Stack Exchange has its own rep.

Ah

No idea why, though.

Probably because it can't exactly be tied with any parent site rep count, because it is a parent site by itself.

or that

@forest Anyway, as for giving downvotes, I've refrain from them unless its really bad. A habit that stuck from when I was sub 1k rep. I do approve of you explaining your issues. That's what I basically do as well, I just don't downvote unless really needed.

I do add that the number of upvotes on my main site Computer Science is super low, unless it is something absurdly trivial and on the hot network questions. (Someone recently got +100 votes on an answers basically saying "We don't say pixel^2 because pixels are objects, not units" WHY)

Usually, if I'd like to downvote, the post is already at -1. In that case, I don't see what further downvoting achieves.

Unfortunately it often is really needed. The last few downvotes I see in my history involves one person suggesting to use the OpenSSL command line utility with 3DES as a general-purpose file encryption tool, someone claiming that a watermark can be used to check if encryption is done correctly, someone saying that PBKDF2 is only necessary if you're against a nation-state attacker, and a few answers which don't actually answer the question.

I think if you downvote should depend more on the poster and less on the post. You don't want to scare away new users by bombing them with -1s on their first post. but it's okay to 'punish' a higher rep user, if they answer with a misinforming post. Everything in the middle can be solved with comments.

Oh god, its over 200 for the 'pixel' answer. And its not even nessecary! The user was in top 3 of all time rep already!

@TomK. I generally tend to agree, especially if the post is bad because they do not understand the site rules (e.g. posting in the wrong place, not giving enough information, etc). But when it's someone coming in to spout conspiracy nonsense, I'll downvote regardless of whether or not they are high or low rep.

@forest but yeah, that's particularly damning and then I think it is really important for people to 'step up' and downvote

true

@forest Hmm, yes I agree that if bad ideas are upvoted downvoting helps. This only occurs on cs.se with Hot network questions. All other 'bad' answers are either already downvoted or are so bad that they should simply be closed/deleted.

Indeed. That's why I downvoted a few of @YetAnotherRandomUser's answers (among other people's). I do not take kindly to overt promotion of GRC (in the same way I don't promote homebrew crypto or nonsense saying that you need to use an OTP because AES is NSA or some crap).

yup, HNQ are pretty much the same here

and where you really have to fight against the nonsense

I also don't get why people downvote off-topic questions that should be closed/deleted. I mean, they don't get deleted/closed faster if you downvote and it doesn't work to discourage answering, really.

Yeah, it's frustrating. There was one some months ago asking whether or not it's safe to reveal part of an encryption key (with the OP implying that it was asymmetric), and the top answers for the longest time saying it's totally fine and you can do it all you want.

and this is where I think you have to start flagging for 'very low quality' and the mods have to take the answer down

where downvoting will do nothing

5 people voting against 100

Yeah I've tried that before. Either gets "rejected" or "disputed", unfortunately.

yeah, worked for me once iirc

@forest What? I mean, even if you can't prove sharing a part of your key allows an actual attack, revealing even 'metadata' (such as, is it an even digit?) on only a part of the one thing that is supposed to be the 'key' to your security seems like a very stupid idea.

@forest Perhaps you should ask the mods to be more bold or open meta issues to discuss it when (allegedly) really bad stuff remains on the main site. HNQ tourists usually stay away from meta, in my experience.

@Discretelizard Well the problem isn't so much that there is metadata so much as the fact that revealing even a fraction of certain key types like RSA will lead to a trivial break of the entire key.

@forest Yeah, I know. Something like this was basically on my Crypto exam :) .

@Discretelizard it was very easy to prove, that it was a stupid idea from the getgo, and still, other users insisted on their right to be wrong

@TomK. I kinda think its not about votes - I try to guide new users through comments, but voting, ideally should be about content, not people.

@JourneymanGeek but most users try to identify if an answer/question is "good" using the count of votes and will probably not read an entire thread of comments that goes on about a technicality in the answer - although it is a very important technicality. Giving good and concise comments is probably better than voting, but you have to help the average user with identifying the quality of a post with your expertise

well.. have to.. "should"..? you know what I mean

@TomK. Well a new user might just need a nudge

Yeah it's an irritating phenomenon. I'm not free of it myself, even (I tend to be more willing to downvote something that has already downvoted, and upvote that which is already upvoted. I have to force myself not to sometimes!). So much for being an individual...

@JourneymanGeek True, and I said, I wouldnt downvote a new user's question if it's not blatantly wrong/stupid/shows no effort. but you said "voting, ideally should be about content, not people" :P

@TomK. Well true! But I hardly if ever downcote.

Closevote, sure. ;p

@JourneymanGeek You can't just say "well, I don't do it" as a reason to not do something (8

@TomK. I never tell people what not to do ;p

I just go "this is what I think". And sometimes they get convinced.

@JourneymanGeek g...reat...?

;p

"I think you shouldn't punch me in the face."

Well, sometimes thought needs to be backed up by action ;)

(which is probably still the same as telling someone what to do)

"I really think punching me in the face would be a bad idea, and you really don't want to find out why"

It's not a real danger until someone creates a Fists-over-TCP RFC.

or this

:D

@forest btw, thanks for linking that bash.org quote in one of your answers. THAT was some throwback. wow :D

@TomK. Ha yeah, gotta love the timeless classics. A year or two ago someone (I think int0x80) wrote a program, where the executable was titled "thekeysarelikerightnexttoeachother.exe". So glad to know that people still know these!

For reference :D

I guess it's not the perfect time to say "hi" :D

Hi!

hai hai

Welp, I got sucked into reading these bash.org quotes. So much for time to be productive.

@forest i will not click on this link!

because that's what happened to me the last time :P

At least the site is only one link deep at all times, so there'll be no exponential runaway.

and @BenoitEsnard perfect timing :D

well, if that isn't a plus

@TomK. Of course it was easy to prove, otherwise it would have been homework, not on the exam ;)

@TomK. Anyway, the insistence of many people to put being 'right' above saying the "right" thing (it should be clear that those two usages of right are different, although both hard to define) is so large that I actually get pretty surprised once someone changes their opinion based on my comments :D

@forest Oh yes, it doesn't have the same problems exponential 'free' time eating power as the 'all-consuming pop culture wiki' that shall not be named to protect the innocent.

@forest Hmm, I do think that adding upvotes on good things is always a good idea regardless of the current vote level, as upvotes feed the rep engine. But I don't like to engage in 'piling on downvotes' (unless it's really bad, but then flagging is usually a better idea. Still, flagging fails at times. Apparently, there are times that mods protect their (indirect) boss despite the communities wide disapproval).

The nice thing about downvoting is, if you comment on the problems with the answer and the author edits their question to fix it, you can trivially remove the downvote.

That's kinda by design

Maybe we can all agree on this: it has to be a combination of both things

Can you remove down-votes without making it an upvote btw? Never knew if that was possible. I have the idea that once voted, a vote remains.

yup

lemme pull up the meta post

._.

shortly

its under "Limits on changing votes" and was surprisingly hard to find ._.

@JourneymanGeek SE and all its nasty editing time limits! I don't know what I hate more, my awful internet connection or all these time limits! (Did you know that my chat posts have to be submitted twice (on average!)?

hah. that happens with aweful internet connections

also I don't have editing limits on chat ;p

there is a time limit, isn't there?

Yeah, there is. Posts older than 5 minutes are locked. I mean, I understand why this is done, but still. It is annoying to fail to edit your post at 5:01.

@forest, yes I was referring to the recent negatives that you posted. Like I said in other comments, you've got an opinion that I only recently came across, even though CS/IS classes are what got me into listening to Steve Gibson almost 12 years ago. Just like I had never heard of attrition.org, and that the 11 things on the site are basically disagreeing with another opinion of the matter.

Aside from attrition.org, the only other references are to something Steve said ~20 years ago. That's not a lot of proof, nor is that authoritative. Hence, that's why it's your (and a few others') opinions.

I don't claim to be any kind of professional expert or regularly chat with people in the industry, so I wouldn't know one way or another what the "word on the street" is unless it's "printed" online somewhere. Which, like I said above, it doesn't exist.

You can have your opinion, but don't play it off like fact if it isn't. That's the root of my beef.

didn't we have this discussion before..?

I see what you did there, lol. That was the first time @Forest and I discussed things and I tried to get some info by coming here. I may not have made my point very clearly; the few sources that you guys point out all very much dislike Gibson. But I can't find any more sources, meaning it's not as widespread of a dislike as some people make it out to be.

I am all for stamping out inaccuracies in technical information. However, given Gibson's target audience and a lack of widespread "fact checking", I'm not inclined to change my opinion. Which is that he's good 201 level material that gets things mostly right with the occasional slip-up, which he then corrects. I'm certainly not convinced that he's a fraud. The incongruity is obviously bothering me, especially because I want to learn about InfoSec.

@TomK. various times over the last five years. We even have a blog post on it

@YetAnotherRandomUser he has proven through examples that what he sells is snake oil, perhaps with a few exceptions. I would not ever suggest anyone use anything he provides

Just my personal opinion.

He gets things mostly wrong, with the occasional slip-up

Weird, I never really read anything by that guy

Is he still doing stuff?

Yeah. Seems to be

BTW, re: our ctftime team, I didn't get any response from them

Maybe we need to ping some old members to find out who the team admin is

Maybe they were mistaking my inquiry for a social engineering attempt, heh

@LucasKauffman Are you, by any chance, our CTFtime team admin?

Well, I've logged in to check my profile

Mine is pending forever too