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0 pointsMithaldu9y ago0 comments

For two years in a row Rubin has given talks about Perl, "exposing issues", in talks that are 99% straight lies or at the very least gross misrepresentations. They cannot in any good conscience be characterized as anything other than intentional trolling and spreading of FUD.

He has been thanked by CCC orga directly for his contributions as well, thus making it clear that they support such shenanigans.

As far as i am concerned, every talk at CCC is highly suspect, since they either don't give a damn as to whether it is correct, or they actively support talks being given in bad faith to an unsuspecting audience.

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thewavelength9y ago

Or you just simply have to accept the fact that congress is more than 100%-always-correct-scientific-talks but rather is about entertainment too. And that is a thing Rubin can bring to congress.

MithalduOP9y ago

His talks were in the Security track, not the entertainment track. At no point in the talks did he acknowledge that it wasn't meant to be factual either. Additionally, there's a wide gulf between 1% correct and 100% correct he could've aimed for.

I would be understanding if the CCC orga put him in the entertainment track, but they did not do that for two years in a row despite having received feedback.

He was intentionally spreading misinformation and the CCC orga supported him in that. These are simple facts.

minxomat9y ago

I remember a talk of his about Perl sec issues in bugzilla (I think - correct me if I'm wrong here). Even though it was a problem that was a result of clearly bad code, he still blamed Perl for it.

At first, I thought he was going for a darker Brooker-ish humor, but in the end, the lack of research showed. I got the impression that he tried to shoehorn some corner-case examples into the general "Perl is a security nightmare" narrative.

It could have been someone else, but it sure sounds like him. It's a bad thing to do in a talk either way.

Edit 1: I've found a rather angry response[1] to the talk I was thinking of (Perl Jam 2). This is just for reference, I don't necessarily share the blog post's opinions.

Edit 2: Here's the Bugzilla[2] "bug".

[1] - http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2015/12/response-to-...

[2] - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1230932

xxyxx9y ago

He really seemed strange to me when I saw him at first, I have no clue about perl, but even to me he made some kind of impression, that he has not really done his research.

His character and presenting seemed really strange to me. I was honestly totally confused by his presentation and couldn't make out if this was supposed to be funny or if he is serious.

And if it was supposed to be funny, I didn't find it funny at all.

All in all, I was really irritated by his talk and avoided all his talks ever since.

reading your comments, it seems that was the right choice

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