The confrontation with NCommander left a bad taste. To me NC has done a quality tech-journalistic inquiry, whether you agree with conclusions or not, the way they arrived at them is well substantiated and verifiable.

2:32 info-zip was first released in early 90s. It was open source permissively licensed available in Pascal and C and EVERYONE was using it. Notably, it's not the original implementation of Zip, that belongs to PKZip. So i think "wrote zip folder code" is applicable because the actual unzip implementation was a solved problem, and the key innovation was specifically hooking into Explorer's filesystem handling.

I don't actually mind the vertical watermark thing, by all reason it could have been as he remembers it and then could have eventually shipped a different implementation. Rendering to an offscreen context has some pitfalls that it will sometimes break in adventurous ways, particularly colour manipulations can have weird adverse effects and ClearType interference, i can see why it was replaced with a bitmap asset.

4:30 memory fragmentation is a REAL THING and the prime cause of web browser out-of-memory crashes on 32-bit systems, but also affects numerous videogames and other software, it concerns a pattern of allocations which creates a growing pool of unusable wasted memory in between prior allocations. Of course the utility does nothing to combat it, it just wastes memory forcing the system to swap out, and then releases its memory. It can be seen as helpful as when you're launching something memory hungry, the initial experience can be substantially more pleasant than otherwise, since the IO pressure of loading in and swapping out no longer end up fighting with each other, which is quite relevant when you're dealing with a seek-limited hard disk. Website promise of what it does is misleading.

@@walllable  Dave and NC brought out videos about Space Cadet Pinball around the same time. Dave claims there's no 64-bit pinball for reason... i forget. Raymond Chen says he remembers that it was buggy and didn't work properly. NC found a version which is 64-bit native and actually DOES work properly, and he experimented with his own machine code level fixes for the issues.

Then Dave accused NC of stirring up drama and being clickbait, which is as far as i see it completely uncalled for.

@@SianaGearz Weird. Thanks for the context

@@SianaGearz I was aware of this, but didn't want to include in the video. I think it's unrelated to the subject. There's another episode where he claimed some stupid stuff about Linux, it's available on Reddit.

@@Endermanchthe "stupid stuff" was accusing Linus Torvalds of bundling binary blobs in the Linux kernel. that's a blatant violation of the GPL and we would've known by now.

yes. certain tools whose offshoots are still brazenly marketed today actually had TRUE value back in the days, simply because of fundamental difference like 16 vs 32 vs 64 bit arch or other similar fundamental workings of computers back then. so at least in this regard it is not apropriate to come to quick judgements.

If you could be so kind, NCommander uses they/them pronouns.

I wouldn't say the memory defragmentation tool does nothing.

Thank you for this. You basically sum up everything for this, and its nice to know that actual work beats clickbait time and again.

There exist no publicly known Windows NT builds with the automatically generated start menu banner. Dave tried to defend his BS by talking about early beta builds, but they have a bitmap too. His video makes it sound as if millions of people were using "his" start menu, and he shows screenshots of the final NT4 build. In reality, his code was so bad that it never shipped in any known releases (and NT4 was a short project that only switched the shell).

The zip folders thing... He integrated a crap library with Explorer. Every time I accidentally use Dave's zip folders instead of 7zip, it's slow and annoying. Not much to be proud of.

@@Kwpolska I used zip folders when it first shipped. It was fantastic for the time.

@@insanemalIt was acceptable with 2000-era single-threaded CPUs and spinning rust HDDs, but it aged pretty badly.

@@Kwpolska without a doubt. Which is the age of said website.

@@Kwpolska I was writing something really long, but my opinion boils down to that 7zip is definitely faster, partly because explorer as a whole has aged pretty poorly in terms of optimization (I think this because code of the zip implementation hasn't changed since 2000, and it was fast back then), and partly because 7zip is just really good software.

This reply contains false information. @GoogleDoesEvil pointed out below that the zip code was replaced in windows 11.

@@Kwpolska And now with 7zip support, it doesn't even report progress on the decompression until it's actually done, so you sit there wondering if it locked up or not.

@@gairisiuil Zip code was replaced in Windows 11

@@GoogleDoesEvil I'm not a Windows 11 user, so I didn't know. Thanks for the info.

Recently, in his video on crowd strike, he actually described userspace code as running in Ring 1, which is absolutely does not. Userland is Ring 3. I know for a lot of people, even some userspace developers, the ring system will be news, but someone who wants to talk from authority on how to operating systems work would NOT get that wrong.

It would be like someone saying "C didn't have the ++ operator, that was introduced in C++, hence the name."

If you aren't a programmer, that might seem reasonable. If you are a programmer, that person just outed themselves as not being a programmer.

The commenter and everyone who respects NCommander cared. Feck off and leave the basement for once.@@hrr597

@@hrr597 Apparently people do because it was changed. Learn to be a little bit more respectful.

@@OhhCrapGuy "C didn't have the ++ operator, that was introduced in C++, hence the name" is one of the dumbest and funniest things I've ever heard. Good example.


Never ask a woman her age. A man, his salary, and what dave plumber was doing in 2003

Bullshit. Especially the salary part. Salary should be discussed

This whole "don't ask salary" stuff is something made by corporates to avoid paying equal salaries. Buuuuuuuut, its something good too, not totally evil.<br>That was just my 2 cents; enjoy the meme ;)

This whole "don't ask salary" stuff is something made by corporates to avoid paying equal salaries. Buuuuuuuut, its something good too, not totally evil.
That was just my 2 cents; enjoy the meme ;)

@@Bruno_Knoxx discussing compensation can result in hurt feelings. but I'd rather people get fair treatment than worry too much about their temporarily hurt feelings. sometimes you gotta crack an egg to make an omelette. of course if all the people involved know they work at a place that does unequal treatment of employees, and the employees aren't going to band together to try to demand fixes for it, then it'd just be rubbing salt in the wound.<br>this is why some nordic countries require compensation to be publicly available information (with some limitations, but much fewer than in other countries). they have a LOT of trust built into their society, though, so it wouldn't work nearly as well in a lot of other countries. not without a ton of social change first.

@@Bruno_Knoxx discussing compensation can result in hurt feelings. but I'd rather people get fair treatment than worry too much about their temporarily hurt feelings. sometimes you gotta crack an egg to make an omelette. of course if all the people involved know they work at a place that does unequal treatment of employees, and the employees aren't going to band together to try to demand fixes for it, then it'd just be rubbing salt in the wound.
this is why some nordic countries require compensation to be publicly available information (with some limitations, but much fewer than in other countries). they have a LOT of trust built into their society, though, so it wouldn't work nearly as well in a lot of other countries. not without a ton of social change first.

💀 Idk how often I've encountered this already but it gets <br>me in every case XD. So old and good. It never dies.

💀 Idk how often I've encountered this already but it gets
me in every case XD. So old and good. It never dies.


It honestly boggles my mind how someone would retire from Microsoft just to make adware and scareware to scam old ladies 💀

Unlike the current employees of Microsoft who are making spyware

Maybe to proof a point to Microsoft, that they didn't treat customers and security seciously? Remember those days when people occupied Microsoft to return their copies of Windows?

well… ethics aside, which would you prefer: work your ass off for a good salary or sit around and get millions doing very little?

@@DogsRNice Dave truly was ahead of his time

Windows XP made me a lot of money as a technican had to clean this trash on people's computers

@@yoymate6316 if we were going to ignore all ethics i might as well search for a costumer support job in india

i thought he was a good old man youtuber. i didnt watch his videos. most prolly i didnt like it.

for such a yee yee ass company called "SoftwareOnline" as well

Who's two bananitti anymore until they started making spyware@ns3421thelocomotives

Well, looking how i windows look today, im not suprise, than old employee wanna part od cake for that, someone who buy this fake software is proof than everyone can use computer, not everyone should.

There’d have to be a giant-assfuk ton of cash because MSFT stock in the 90’s and 2000’s was NVDA or AMZN today. Crap ware to scare rubes. Come ON!

@@ArmelM101 Especially considering how much other old school MS alumni have achieved after retiring. Pretty sure this guy worked there around the same time as Gabe Newell.

@@Barnacules LMAO ex microsoft employee beef

@@yoymate6316 I mean, I want to accomplish things in life. Sure, I'm not rich or anything, but I have a lot of fun projects and challenges to work on. And often enough, I even get to make people's lives better.

Money is a terrible way for the value of your life. I mean, can you imagine literally any other endeavor in which a single scalar value would be a smart way to measure a system?

@ns3421thelocomotives Is he really? Or is it a matter of visibility, Microsoft does a lot out in the open for how exposed everything they do is.
They're all like this however, didn't Facebook have rootkits on people's phones to track what they were searching on Google and stuff? They're taking the term benign programmer term "hacker" too literally imo lol
When i re-watch Pirates of Silicon Valley nowadays, when Jobs talks about how his employees are pirates, nowadays i imagine they're installing rootkits on my machines and trying to steal my search and activity data.

@@Barnacules Bro you have nothing to add to this, I remember you going apeshit on youtube in 2016. You had the worst case of the TDS I've ever seen from a tech channel lmao.


This is like learning one of your favorite musicians quit Iron Maiden to join a cover band and got caught selling oxy out of the back of the tour bus.

@@rocket2739 I realized after posting that that while I don't actually know about the oxy, Paul DiAnno did quit Iron Maiden to do covers! 🤣

A lot of us really liked Dave’s content before discovering something off about him. Even before this video we parted ways with each other after following eachother for a long time since we both came from Microsoft to YouTube. But he was defending Elon Musk doing illegal things to make money and getting away with it saying it should be celebrated that he’s smart enough to game the system. That instantly raised a bunch of red flags.

@@Barnacules Didn't know you watched Enderman!

Seems from what you say, Dave must admire a criminal who gets away with the crime, since he didn't himself.

@@charlie_nolan He literally changed the twitter logo to doge to try and bury news coverage of the trial he had for the doge coin rugpull

Would it really matter if they got caught selling drugs in either a band or a cover band? I mean, it comes with the territory.

@@chuuisinsane <br>Basically this dude was selling fake oxys filed with pig dewormer... lol

@@chuuisinsane
Basically this dude was selling fake oxys filed with pig dewormer... lol

@@Barnacules Never meet your heroes, I guess...If I heard the Elon thing, I'd 100% have been done with him on the spot.

@@tankermottind very quirky and yet perfect way to describe the situation 🤣


No way bro, I actually liked the guy a lot too, actually sad 😭

I was thinking better of him too before I learnt this.

@@EStartive does he still practice this shady business? If he doesn't, I don't see a problem.

You can’t be blamed, I even liked the guy until he defended Elon Musk for committing actual crimes celebrating him making money by breaking the legal system. Now I get why he took that stance.

@@Barnacules Oh damn... D: ... ...that sucks.

@@guestc142 he doesn’t seem to, however a number of his windows development tales were found to be either heavy embellishments or outright lies, soooo…

@@yoymate6316 he's definitely going about this the wrong way. I guess he doesn't want to be known for scamming, but I guess that has changed today

@@Barnacules He defended the elongated muskrat?

@@Endermanch I wasn't thinking <i>too</i> great of him because he did seem to kinda suck up a lot to business owners and stuff.  So it probably does track.

@@Endermanch I wasn't thinking _too_ great of him because he did seem to kinda suck up a lot to business owners and stuff.  So it probably does track.

@@guestc142 He seems to be actively in defense of the behavior.  He doesn't seem like he's really learned or moved on from it or did right by people in any way in compensation for the past.  He just denies there's any problem at all.

@@EStartive he still lies about things he did despite him not having done that

@@yoymate6316 sort by newest, you might see my replies

I had no freaking idea. Thanks! Now I’m going to unsubscribe and block his channel on YouTube.

@@guestc142go check the ncommander thingy


bro i swear we LITERALLY CANT TRUST ANY YOUTUBER

Oh fuck your right I remember when you could trust everything n199a and you had some community but everybody's blowing up

Almost as if youtubers could be any random person.

@@TuxraGameryes but how come like half the youtubers are hiding something

@@SOTP. Same as with any other person, the successful ones are usually extremely obsessive over the rest of their lives.

You can trust me, because I haven’t made a video in 3 years other than one weekly live stream 😂 So my fame level has dropped below the untrustworthiness sell your soul bar 😆

@@muhammadajibakriaji3753I don’t trust myself though

@@corndoggoiscool8223 even blud got into trust issue fights two years ago i can remember it happening before my very eyes. i cant enjoy shit no more

Least of all ones whose descriptons start with "Let's hit 20k likes".

but we can trust Enderman, right? ...right?

@@SOTP.  Why would you trust any Youtuber in the first place without critical thinking?

@@RanEncounteri think i said this wrong: point is, everytime ur subbed to a youtuber and watch them often, boom they get exposed for liking kids or something else

@@SOTP. Yes and that is why you should never skip the critical thinking part and actually verify what they say.

You need to trust the Windows Modules Installer

I'm calling it in 5 years smth bad will hapoen@@corndoggoiscool8223

@@chromedud no. You cannot trust enderman without verifying what they say is true. We cannot just selectively apply your critical thinking skills.

@@RanEncounter 1. HE. ITS A HE NOT A THEY YOU CAN HEAR HIS VOICE MF 2 mf i would like you to run malware on a pc connected on your home wifi it can virus all devices connected on your home wifi

@@Barnaculeslol<br>we used to enjoy your old videos tough

@@Barnaculeslol
we used to enjoy your old videos tough

@@Barnacules hey Barnacules, ex-Microsoft employee, "insert ex-google ex-facebook ex-techlead jokes", how's it going

Why would you? It's not like you know these people

@@johnsimon8457 Actually that was me in a Linus costume

And so does this channel you just watched apparently by that logic

After the MrBeast allegations, this is more true than ever.


Dave Plummer in 1996: Let's acquire people's trust!
Dave Plummer in 2003: Now that I have everybody's trust, it is time to scam everyone!
Dave Plummer in 2007: *gets sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars*
Dave Plummer afterwards: Let's forget stuff like this was even real

Dave Plummer in 1996: Let's acquire people's trust!
Dave Plummer in 2003: Now that I have everybody's trust, it is time to scam everyone!
Dave Plummer in 2007: **gets sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars**
Dave Plummer afterwards: Let's forget stuff like this was even real

Funny how he writes a book about the secrets of how he became a millionaire while being on the spectrum and doesn’t include the part about running a scam that made millions after leaving Microsoft and paying out a settlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars and still having enough to retire for life 🤔 Seems like an important part of the story if you ask me. I wonder if he went into other scams like crypto and nft, etc that we just don’t know about yet. Usually when people are okay with scamming they will keep doing it so long as they make more money than they have to pay out when caught.

Dave in 2024 (maybe): It's in the Autism spectrum?!?!

Lmao fuck that's a good joke haha@@vinching926

@@vinching926 As a guy with autism that hurt me just reading lol.

@@vinching926 Or the narcissism spectrum.

@@vinching926 autistic people are usually the victims of scammers, but never the scammers


Great job tracking all this down. Small edit here: These pieces of malware also had ads that popped up. I cleaned computers during this era and we used "immunization" or host file blocks and you didn't see the extra ads that popped up because the domains no longer serve those ads.

Good to see you here Titus. You, Enderman, and Coffeezilla should do a collab 😆.

Back in those days, there were a few companies, one of them intellisense, which aimed at injecting ads directly into the text of a web page. By searchnig for keywords in the text, then make those keywords clickable with reference to ad sites. We used to fix this problem using the HOST file, and my thinking here is, this is not something any windows user even today has a clue how to do, and so, it would be ligitimate to write a program which referenced those URLS to 0.0.0.0 or something automatically, just for the sake of avoiding this trash. Since I don't know how Daves program worked, this is how I assumed they worked, and OP too it seems, that would had been legitimate. Becausae those injected ads were absolutely scams. Very intrusive. The equivalent of today is an ad blocker, although back then they were directly in the text which was and is illegal, at least in my country, since there was no way anyone could see it was ads.


Idk if you r german, but if you are, you'd know how fucking true this statement is lmfao

@@LAUCHGeorge  what's happening? I am fluent in German but don't watch any Germantube.

4 is always bad news just like toy story 4

@@SianaGearz brief summary: there were at least 3 major creators on YouTube in the last couple of months who got accused (with relatively strong evidence) of abusive behaviour against their partners, among many other things: AnniTheDuck, Unge and Mois. The former two have taken a break (though Anni is already back), Mois is currently on the run, probably due to his alleged actions being relevant to the legal system.

@@TheStiepen taddl has also done a self-exposing, entire childhood breaking down T_T


Unfortunate, but informative. Thank you for your journalism

@@TLAngus1337 A fellow Louis Rossmann enjoyer.


Some people never change. It would have been different had he just come clean, been honest about everything, and just said something like "Yeah... I'm not proud of that." People respect honesty, but he doesn't seem to see an issue...

Yeah if it was clear he learned better and changed his ways and acted better it'd be fine.  Not great because he's still yknow, benefiting in his lifestyle and stability by what he did, but better than he's doing.

Back then the world needed champions to address the tsunami of Windows shortcomings and rather than wear a white hat he wore a black hat to make money on the deal. With his insider knowledge, he could have made a difference. He chose enrichment instead. Sad.


actually, memory defragmentation is important for multiple reasons:
* external fragmentation results in lower probability of being able to allocate large pages (to solve this memory compacting is enough),
* if a large chunk is physically made contiguous (by defragmenting it) can mean being able to replace a 1024 4kB pages with a single 4MB page, with the result that the TLB is much better used, as it will only need a single entry for all that ram.
* only certain ranges of the physical address space can be used for dma, so being able to relocate pages can free those valuable pages for better usage when required.
* locally adjacent ram is read faster because it has higher chances of being predicted for caching.

I'm not aware if that tool defragmented the ram or was only snake oil, but in any case, newer operating systems already come with at least memory compactors

Cool, that’s a better explanation than mine. Still this is a job for the OS and not some 3rd party utility. On the other hand this is windows 95 and not NT

Yeah this could use a few more up votes. I could see if he handed the reigns over the software company they doctored it up more than he originally set things up in the early 90s

"external fragmentation results in lower probability of being able to allocate large pages"<br>Isn't OS kernel smart enough to be able to allocate "contiguous" chunk of memory from the user space process perspective, but fragmented on the physical level?

"external fragmentation results in lower probability of being able to allocate large pages"
Isn't OS kernel smart enough to be able to allocate "contiguous" chunk of memory from the user space process perspective, but fragmented on the physical level?

and 64 bit address spaces reduce the problem significantly

@@Z3rgatul 1. this was windows 95. never underestimate how awful the 9x kernel series was. hence why they ditched it for NT.

2. the program's virtual address space can also be fragmented. I am not super comfortable and familiar with how the TLB works (yet), but I think the fragmentation problem existed at two levels, and the OS probably gets around that problem by having fixed page sizes, and doing the virtualization as you described.

no idea what the program itself did tho. I suspect either snake oil, or working around easy kernel level problems. I really doubt it was going to reach into the virtual address space of a program and do anything about its fragmentation. it would have to find and rewrite pointers to be able to do that, and that sounds extremely slow and error prone unless it's in some controlled runtime/virtual machine type scenario.

@@blarghblargh I see. Now I also think it was snake oil. Doing proper memory defragmentation will require very complex algorithm to be implemented, and you need kernel driver to do the job. Comparing to other Dave's software this seems like impossible task.

Normally you don’t allocate small pieces of ram, you allocate a big chunk and then you split that up inside the application.

No other program can go in and mess around with another programs memmory except the kernel. So you need to be atleast a driver to do that.

What would it actually take to compact the ram for a process?

You would stop the process, copy memmory around on the OS level, and then resume the process. And then you have not defragmented anything inside the menmory of that process, you have only moved like, pages togheter or similar, with very little impact on the performance.

And the OS might do this when swapping in and out apps. So maybe Dave just triggered a swap, buy allocating a bunch of ram and then freeing it.

@@johnsimon8457It was relevant for a 25 year old Windows installation - which was what the intended customers did run.

And yes - it did a difference. How big, would depend on OS version, amount of RAM and actual usage patterns. So it was the kind of program where "try for free for x weeks" would be relevant - not all people would expect any meaningful improvement.

I only had Win95, Win98 on some laptops. On my desktop machines with Win NT 4 or Win2k with max RAM the motherboard supported, the program did not make a difference.

@@Z3rgatul You are thinking about the use of paged memory, where the virtual me.ory can be contiguous while the physical memory was not. But 25 years ago, most people did not run NT or Win2k. And move to Win95/Win98 and they had serious issues with memory allocations.

But there is another issue - the processor has a small cache to lookup and translate from virtual page to physical address. If your page didn't fit in this TLB cache, then extra work is needed to figure out the translation.

So you indirectly have fragmentation of the paging table data too.

Newer x86 processors can make use of multiple page sizes. So not just 4 kB page sizes but up to 1 GB pages. This helps keeping down the number of page mappings.

@@jakobstengard3672 You can't step in and defragment the heap inside a program. That's inside the virtual memory space of the program itself.

But step back to Win95/Win98 and you can ask the OS to defragment the physical memory assigned to the program.

Next thing - you say you allocate a large block that the program then makes use of. Nope. The program allocates an initial amount of RAM for the heap. When the program tries to allocate then malloc() [for a C program] tries to find free memory in the heap. If there is no free space large enough, then malloc() will force an OS call to request more memory to extend the heap size. So a long-running program with a memory leak can keep requesting more and more memory from the OS. And this creates fragmentation for the internal structures of the OS too.

For newer Windows versions, a long-running program that is properly releasing heap data can call the Win32 API HeapCompact() to let the OS see if it can reclaim heap memory no longer used.

For Win95 and Win98, that wasn't designed with secure process isolation, I'm pretty sure you had lots of options to force the OS to trig different optimizations that are not relevant today.

This post seems to trigger quite a lot of malice assumptions, based on people forgetting the big difference between now and 25 years ago.


In protected mode memory fragmentation is a thing that can slow down. As an example whereas the user mode thinks $0100 cames after $00FF, in physical memory that might be in a completely other place inside the memory.


"this is informative, and unfortunate" -Louis Rossmann


While I believe that your past shouldn't define you, what actions you take to fix your past mistakes should. I'm glad that he has gotten away from scamming people, but he hasn't taken any actions to acknowledge his mistakes, which is sad. He seemed like a cool guy.

@@brookedoesstuff what action would be sufficient and who decides this? At what point can Dave move on from his past transgressions? When everyone in the world says so?

Everything in this video was already litigated over a decade ago and court orders issued.

Nobody is perfect but demanding someone "take action" beyond the court order tells me more about you than him.

@@sirtra It's more like if this comes up, make mention of what happened and involvement with it.  Someone that is contrite in their past mistakes and actions, should be willing to show that they have learned from them and how they wronged others.

@@iamnoname-a1 why and where would it ever come up?

@@iamnoname-a1 when does it come up? And every time?

Do you do that for every transgression in your life? When you meet a person, you shake their hand and then start apologizing for all the wrong things you've done decades ago?


If Dave throws a strike, that means the fraud story is true! I didn't expect him to do that...

I don’t think Dave is dumb enough to strike this video knowing full well that it will just lead to it being invested further by even bigger channels like CoffeeZilla. But, if he’s scared about this getting out he might do it out of desperation. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen it happen. Thankfully nothing in this video was outside of fair use and everything said was backed with public evidence available through Wayback machine. So any strike would be overturned in appeal.

@@Barnacules Unc is NOT gonna get investigated by coffee zilla 😭😭😭

@@Barnacules you never know... if techlead even after getting called out by every channel under the sun still tries to take down mutahar's video about him (and failing), it would be too far fetched that dave might try (and hopefully fail)

Probably thats why he unblocked andrew, to not prove he has something to hide, at least the rogues didn't brick the computer or replace the shell

i heard that a good way to get unstriked is to just send law paragraphs to yt lmao


Add that info to Wikipedia, He is presented as a flawless figure

The case has been mentioned there for a long time.  The page is semi-protected and subject to the Biographies of Living Persons policy.


@@JustPyroYT Same mate. Watch as he'll give his judgement on this video at some point by filing false DMCA claim to suppress the information presented here, as many true-nature disgusting YouTuber does. So, don't forget to download this video and feel free to reupload in case this video get taken down.

I never trust old men so i didn't got surprised he was sus like i knew he was sus from beginning... I only trust young men since im a kid but like yea

@@eobardthawnemcocdo you trust your grandpa then?

@@eobardthawnemcoc Age doesn't matter, just don't blindly trust anyone.


Memory fragmentation is important: "Memory fragmentation is when the sum of the available space in a memory heap is large enough to satisfy a memory allocation request but the size of any individual fragment (or contiguous fragments) is too small to satisfy that memory allocation request."


Thanks for covering this. I mentioned this topic years ago on various forums and in YouTube comments, and I got eviscerated by Dave fanboys. They buried their heads in the sand and made lame excuses, so I moved on. Yet here you present everything very well—much better than I did. Well done, and keep up the great content! 👍

He did a great job showing the evidence in this video. It will be harder for Dave’s fanboys to explain it away. However, some will try, they always do. The ones that think if they hang in while everyone else goes away Dave will finally give them attention. I’ve seen it happen many times.

@@Barnacules I was quite doubtful that dave even ran that site until I saw the court documents on screen. It would be nice to get a comment from him regarding it but it seems he's too busy dodging questions. Excellent evidence nonetheless.

Ah damn. I actually liked his videos too, not to a fanboy level, but they always were interesting to me. Never knew about any of this.


you missed the part in the court documents about how it cant be uninstalled like normal

Missed a lot more for example the whole scamming and defrauding which I couldn't substantiate at all from the sources

They should cover Adobe for that. CC injects services that run on the machine, and you can't go through normal methods to uninstall Creative Cloud fully. Not related, just interesting that they've been able to get away with this stuff and nobody bats an eye, and that the FTC is coming at them over their cancelation stuff, but aren't taking other things like that into account

This video was a bit unorganized. Should have used court docs to walk through what's provable 😢


I have a weird feeling that this whole "registry cleaner" works almost exactly like ccleaner, so even on a fresh installation of Windows it still "looks" for problems and can find errors in the registry, even if there shouldn't be any.

And CCCleaner also turned out to be a bit of a scam itself.

I have had to fix the registry twice - a registry key can setup a modius - Windows update has done it seven times in the last twenty odd years.

And then you have "Defraggler" which takes longer to work on a HDD then the build-in defrag of Windows....

@@Incognitiv never used any registry cleaner myself and probably never will, but let's not be naive and think windows doesn't have junk in its registry right off the bat

Ah yes, this fresh install of windows has 50 viruses on it

@@YS_Production Oh I did. Fresh install, used some "Optimizer". Broke Windows. Had to reinstall. SInce then I never used those funky "cleaners".

I think any registry cleaner can find stuff on a fresh windows install. But not every registry cleaner will scare you into buying it or another software. Also some don't trust ccleaner either.

@@YS_ProductionExcept the junk is literally mostly empty keys that are taking up maybe 1-2 bytes of space. You aren't losing anything of value.<br>The point is, it's not dangerous, an error, will cause performance problems, or something you need to fix. In fact, it's probably perfectly normal. It would have been better to check these keys and make sure they weren't made up by the program itself.

@@YS_ProductionExcept the junk is literally mostly empty keys that are taking up maybe 1-2 bytes of space. You aren't losing anything of value.
The point is, it's not dangerous, an error, will cause performance problems, or something you need to fix. In fact, it's probably perfectly normal. It would have been better to check these keys and make sure they weren't made up by the program itself.


Dave always triggered something suspicious in me... but I was willing to chalk it up to 20+ years of misgivings about M$ and try to separate the man from the company (he was a Dev and not responsible for the questionable things that the company did)... turns out I need to trust my Spidey sense

For me it was the constant reminding in his titles with "by a Windows developer" that triggered it

Had a similar Spidey sense, but it was mostly how he acted. He felt a little too positive, a little too calm, a little too humble. There was still bits and pieces of his info that felt accurate, but things never 100% added-up. Some info didn't make sense, he'd always brush-off the negative stuff like it wasn't a big deal, and he'd try to avoid mentioning anyone else that should have worked with him (like the actual guys who made the original 3D Space Cadet pinball). It was always "me, me, me" with him.

Never really subbed to him because of that. I'd still watch a handful of his videos, but only the ones where other people covered the same topic, or if I was familiar enough with the topic. Even then it was just with a grain of salt, and as a curiosity more than anything.

@@thepuzzlemaster64 Yeah I prefer Bryan Lunduke for stories Y2K era Microsoft... he wasn't in Windows Dev ofc... and as with anyone I don't just beleive him uncritically. But he as you say he includes negative and positive moments as moments that don't always make him look the best.

@@klingoncowboy4
Oh yeah, Bryan Lunduke is heaps better. He's the type of guy that even though I don't always agree with his opinions, he still comes off as genuine and overall a nice dude to hang-out with.

Speaking-of, a great video to compare the difference between Bryan Lunduke, and Dave Plummer is the open-source DOS 4.0 videos.

Bryan Lunduke's video talks about the oddities of the repo with how broken some of the files are, and how they don't mention which version of DOS 4.0 was released to Github since it doesn't quite match-up with the retail copy, and so on.

Meanwhile in Dave Plummer's video about it, he was able to compile it somehow through massive workarounds that are never shown, talks about his time developing part of it, and praises Microsoft for putting it out there for the public (even though no one can compile it).

You'd think a developer like Dave Plummer would be more critical about Microsoft's little blunders, but he just pretends they don't exist. Every time. That was the first massive red flag for me

@@klingoncowboy4 I mean, let's not go praising bryan lunduke of all people as someone better than this guy.  You don't need to take another cow turd to avoid a cow turd.

"there is no NSA backdoor in windows" ok this guys a rat

@@thepuzzlemaster64I think the not mentioning others is mostly for when they don’t want to be mentioned (and from fear of legal issues as he probably learned with SoftwareOnline), because he does have other people on his channel and interview them every while.

@@NitroDubzzz well the _NSAKEY is probably not a backdoor

@@NitroDubzzz that is true through. at least for back then. source code was leaked in windows and if anything like that was found it would've made news

@@thepuzzlemaster64 If he mentioned others who helped develop relevant products more often, his channel would actually be interesting. Instead he just glosses over "other people helped" etc.

He was always a blowhard, which is not in itself a crime, but when the real truth came out it made so much sense!


The virgin Dave Plummer vs the chad Raymond Chen


I feel this video is going to end with a strike

Enderman is big enough as to where it would backfire horrifically for Dave

@@hedwig7scorrect, with the people already aware of this video the second he strikes it then the water is chummed for someone like coffeezilla to get involved. And something tells me Dave wouldn’t want people looking into his crypto wallets with a history of doing stuff like this. 😆

@@hedwig7s if a strike happens he's basically digging his own grave. With the way the video is designed enderman could easily counter the claim and win making it even worse for him.

@@dlaczegomuszerobicnowykanal i need to hear the history behind ur username lol

@@nezu_cc YouTube will however see his history of upheld strikes and consider that in any appeal.

@@soundspark YouTube doesn't get involved in DMCA, DMCA is a legal problem between two individuals. YouTube will temporarily take the video down, but if the other person decides to counter the claim at this point YouTube will do whatever the court decides.

@nezu_cc  If it gets taken down on Community Guidelines then my arguments would be valid.

@mrfoxesite  And as such he may be out for revenge even if it means going after people unrelated to his channel and have been in good legal standing for over 18 years.

And of course Enderman's intro is still an Enderman obviously having sex wirh a pumpkin.


Downloading this video just in case youtube throws the forbidden thunder strike of deletion


Speaking of misinformation, Dave stated that Linus Torvalds includes a binary blob in the Linux kernel that nobody has access to the source for. We know there are various closed source blobs in Linux drivers but Dave's assertion here is completely false: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqWjq2SdzpI&lc=UgwFYyE8lw0hQzBQj154AaABAg


MemTurbo: Defragments RAM<br>My pointers: 👋

MemTurbo: Defragments RAM
My pointers: 👋

16-bit windows would actually sort of defragment memory, since it was so scarce and more allocations increased the risk of allocation failures. You would have to make sure not to keep any stale pointers to unlocked global memory, otherwise you'd have problems.

Now that you mention it, it’s kind of surprising that everything wouldn’t segfault immediately after that “defragmentation”… I guess we’re both aware what that implies. Sure, dynamic memory is an abstraction from physical memory (that enables swapping), but still… I wouldn’t be confident about it doing anything at all.

@@vimicito programmers aren't always great at their jobs, and I'm sure it happened plenty ;)<br>The idea is that when you allocate data using GlobalAlloc and the moveable flag is specified, you're returned an HGLOBAL that you can pass to GlobalLock to get a pointer to the memory you allocated. And once you're done with the memory (for now), then you GlobalUnlock it and the memory is free to be moved around by the memory manager. But yeah if you kept a copy of that pointer from before you'll have a bad time

@@vimicito programmers aren't always great at their jobs, and I'm sure it happened plenty ;)
The idea is that when you allocate data using GlobalAlloc and the moveable flag is specified, you're returned an HGLOBAL that you can pass to GlobalLock to get a pointer to the memory you allocated. And once you're done with the memory (for now), then you GlobalUnlock it and the memory is free to be moved around by the memory manager. But yeah if you kept a copy of that pointer from before you'll have a bad time

There is a concept known as memory handles. It's a dual-indirection where the handle points to an OS-owned pointer that points to the memory block.

The OS can pause the program, move around all memory blocks - defragment - and update the second-level pointer.

The next time the program does a memory access, it can still use the same handle. But the indirection will now point to a different physical address.

Windows have special function calls to demand that a memory block must be locked. That's needed in case you may do DMA transfers in which case the hardware DMA would not understand about any defragment suddenly moving the buffer.

And you may also need to lock blocks in the lowest MB of RAM, because that memory might be shared with some old-school DOS driver/application.

So memory defragmentation is a very valid thing for situations where you don't have paged memory allocated to the running programs. We can't take Windows 10/11 experiences from 2024 and apply to 20-25 year old Windows installations.

@@perwestermark8920 Ah yes but your reasonable and logical response will not be adequate. The problem is that this type of channel only exists to create gossip and attract the type of mindless reactionaries who are addicted to being outraged. You could point out extremely technical information but that will not be enough because this audience of people who solely exist on the left hand side of the bell curve only want one thing. To be told what to think and what to believe.

@@o0Donuts0o I'm a bit interested in how some viewers calls this journalism, while there is lots of snickering in the video instead of cool, calm and collected neutral reporting. Extra interesting given a large number of factual errors.

From a factual standpoint, I think Dave's programs was too aggressive about showing popup warnings. And implied way too big danger levels. And the actual court documents also shows that there was auto-selected options on the purchase forms - I don't like the automatic subscription etc some vendors tries to trick people into buying by preselected checkboxes.

This could have been a good video if it had focused on that. Instead, it contains a huge amount of factual errors about the programs, explicitly claiming the programs are scams by a video creator that just do not have the knowledge to discuss that subject.

One specific thing the court complained about is that the InternetShield did not explicitly test to access the over 2000 listed bad web sites. The scan did check the list of blocked sites inside InternetExplorer - so it would warn even if the user had blocked the sites by other means. The court document specifically mentioned the host file.

I'm not sure if there is a way to do a full scan as in try actual Internet accesses to the sites. It needs to be done by the IE engine. And it's specifically because the IE engine was so vulnerable that you do not want a drive by shooting by having IE connect to one of the bad sites. IE really was the most fragile and dangerous web browser, and a single one-pixel bad link from a page to a hostile site could have IE mauled. This was a time when we really did have to be very afraid of IE accessing a bad link.

Another interesting aspect about the court document is about uninstalling everything. Neither the complaint nor the judgement mentions what was left. But it would be a sad day for demo software which can do x file recoveries/cleanups/fixes if the uninstall must remove absolutely everything. That allows the user to uninstall and reinstall an infinite number of times to get around any "max x repairs in free version".

With today's sneaky inclusion of serial numbers in the processor, a backend server could be used to check if that serial number has been seen before. But "only works with Internet access" doesn't feels like an improvement. That's how we get software that stops working if the seller closes down.

@@o0Donuts0o I'm a bit interested in how some viewers calls this journalism, while there is lots of snickering in the video instead of cool, calm and collected neutral reporting. Extra interesting given a large number of factual errors.

From a factual standpoint, I think Dave's programs was too aggressive about showing popup warnings. And implied way too big danger levels. And the actual court documents also shows that there was auto-selected options on the purchase forms - I don't like the automatic subscription etc some vendors tries to trick people into buying by preselected checkboxes.

This could have been a good video if it had focused on that. Instead, it contains a huge amount of factual errors about the programs, explicitly claiming the programs are scams by a video creator that just do not have the knowledge to discuss that subject.

One specific thing the court complained about is that the InternetShield did not explicitly test to access the over 2000 listed bad web sites. The scan did check the list of blocked sites inside InternetExplorer - so it would warn even if the user had blocked the sites by other means. The court document specifically mentioned the host file.

I'm not sure if there is a way to do a full scan as in try actual Internet accesses to the sites. It needs to be done by the IE engine. And it's specifically because the IE engine was so vulnerable that you do *not* want a drive by shooting by having IE connect to one of the bad sites. IE really was the most fragile and dangerous web browser, and a single one-pixel bad link from a page to a hostile site could have IE mauled. This was a time when we really did have to be very afraid of IE accessing a bad link.

Another interesting aspect about the court document is about uninstalling everything. Neither the complaint nor the judgement mentions what was left. But it would be a sad day for demo software which can do x file recoveries/cleanups/fixes if the uninstall must remove absolutely everything. That allows the user to uninstall and reinstall an infinite number of times to get around any "max x repairs in free version".

With today's sneaky inclusion of serial numbers in the processor, a backend server could be used to check if that serial number has been seen before. But "only works with Internet access" doesn't feels like an improvement. That's how we get software that stops working if the seller closes down.

@@o0Donuts0o Yeah lets just forget about regcleaner and him being sued for selling malware. The memturbo addressed a real thing! So it must be legit! Just like regcleaner addresses a real thing, so it must be legit!
You can also ignore all the comments about this being pinned and liked by the video author. Sounds like Enderman is trying to hide this because of his blind hatred right?
I must be to the left of the bell curve and all those court documents, quotes from Dave's book, and live demonstrations of the software with credits to Dave's company website are just all a conspiracy


That sucks. Dave looked a really sweet guy and he do give a nice vibe on his videos, but looking at this is really sad. I really hoped he addressed this better, but it seems he do not take responsibility over his scam endeavors. D:


Apparently this was "public" on reddit over 3 years ago. Was in a thread about Dave Plummer too, so it has been out there for a while. But clearly that didn't get enough exposure, hopefully this video changes that.


Let's not forget that he literally said he thinks Windows is better than Linux, I don't think you can trust any software dev that says that, not liking Linux is one thing (I personally don't cause I don't want to deal with all possible issues that can happen from the smallest things) but saying it's worse than Windows is a whole other thing.

In what context though? Because if you think of it from the perspective of available software, then there is no doubt that wiondows is better. But which parameters did he use? Comparing for example vista to any linux OS, then any linux OS would be better no matter what because I have never seen any linux system which wasn't 3-4 times faster than vista. So again, in what context? What parameters were used to define what "better" is?


I find this more interesting than upsetting. Humans are complicated. I wonder how he feels about this period of his life now.

20 years and nothing new coming? He probably regrets and feels embarrassed. No wonder he doesn't talk about it.


What a fantastic video. Thank you so much for making it mate.
I’ve been following Dave for about a year and been commenting on his Twitter stuff too. He seemed like an alright bloke.

But now, I’m completely disgusted by him.

I know he’s autistic, but imagine writing a book applauding yourself for being a millionaire when you managed that purely by scamming innocent people?  What an horrendous individual. Has he no shame?

He’s basically The Wolf of Redmond


When Dave released a vid a few years ago promoting farming of some random crypto, that was a dead giveaway he's not clean.

Constant bad takes on many topics are also glaring red flags.

Do you know the name of the video? I suspect the may have been involved in crypto scams too if he was willing to do this.

@@Barnacules I think they mean his video about how to mine some crypto coin called Chia

“Bad takes on many topics” is a pretty subjective thing though. I thought there was a little bit of rich jerk hiding in there but he generally seems cool and I’m sad watching this.


I remember seeing a reply to a comment on one of his videos that mentioned a "proprietary binary blob built into every Linux kernel that only Linus has the code to" and the only source I saw backing it up is Microsoft's Halloween documents. Weird of him to try and back up Microsoft's weird old propaganda

"binary blob" is a phrase I never thought I'd hear, but I wonder what that comment was mentioning

@@timecubed basically Linux is open source that meaning you have access to the code BUT there are some parts that are not really open and only contain executable binary. there are binary blobs in the Linux kernel mostly firmware stuff but im not aware if they are owned by Linus Torvalds or not (because you know pratical reasons). There are some kernels like Linux-libre that aims to be completely free software but they come with compatibility issues.<br>I don't think he said "that only Linus has the code to" he said "that Torvalds owns" meaning the was the one to push the binary code.

@@timecubed basically Linux is open source that meaning you have access to the code BUT there are some parts that are not really open and only contain executable binary. there are binary blobs in the Linux kernel mostly firmware stuff but im not aware if they are owned by Linus Torvalds or not (because you know pratical reasons). There are some kernels like Linux-libre that aims to be completely free software but they come with compatibility issues.
I don't think he said "that only Linus has the code to" he said "that Torvalds owns" meaning the was the one to push the binary code.

@@zedzed3533the Linux kernel itself contains no proprietary code at all. Binary blobs occur when devices either require firmware to be loaded to them by the computer (the case with many wireless chipsets), or there is no open source driver available for a device. In the former case the required firmware would have to be acquired separately to the kernel, and in the latter, it’s unrelated, since the closed source driver wouldn’t come from the kernel, but from the manufacturer of the device.

@@minneelyyyy  binary blobs do exist but they are all stuff like certain device drivers (mostly peripherals like wifi cards), firmware and cpu microcode updates which manufacturers don't wanna open source or can't (IP reasons), without the binary blob you cannot run linux on most hardware. This is why linux-libre (kernel with foss components only) systems only work on a limited range of devices without something breaking.

The b in blob already stands for binary, you can just say a blob instead of a binary blob, which is redundant. The discussion is nice, just a clarification for the unaware.

@@ShuAbLe are you thinking of BLOB (binary large object)? That’s different from binary blob (that’s referring to a binary executable)

He is correct in the assertion about blobs existing in most Linux kernels, but I do not think Linus has the source, it is just firmware


This is unfortunate but informative. He should have owned up to, made reparations, and apologized for this a long time ago. It’s too late now though. I’ve unsubscribed from him. Thank you for informing us as viewers about when we’re being conned.


No way, i never expected this from dave plummer


I hope rogueamp eventually comes back, we need more rogue AV reviewers…


Dave's current motto: "Please remember that I am ~MOSTLY~ in this for the subs and like..."


Manz he actually seemed like a chill YouTuber


Damn this really shocked me, i probably not gonna stop watching hos videos cus they are pretty interesting but im never gonna be able to look at him in the same way again


bruh he said that the company was founded in 1984, then changed his mind and said in 1993...

@@YaySyu no, what the person is saying is that on the original site, it said SoftwareOnline was started around 1984, but then it changed to 1993 in the newer site.

And Joe Biden said "Putin", but meant "Zelensky". And my mother goes through all my siblings before she comes up with my name; just like granma, for reference. Point being: it's an error, not a potential case for a Hague tribunal.

@@cbs1710The difference is that Joe Biden was making an oral statement. Websites are edited for hours at a time; putting 1984 must've been intentional.

@@YaySyuI think he has had two companies. He did have one since long before he started to work at Microsoft. The 1984 is probably a correct date for the company used to sell Amiga software etc.

He probably killed off that company while working for Microsoft [somewhere after selling Microsoft the Explorer ZIP integration].

And then later started a new company - the one that made him decide to stop working for Microsoft. And I assume that's the company this video is about.

compulsive liars cant keep their lies straight

@@cbs1710 I don't know why it got deleted, but I'll say it again

The difference here is that Joe was making a speech. An oral statement. He can't change what he just said. On the other hand, Plummer here made a website. A website that can be edited and can have changes before publishing a new version of it.

@@munastronaut8147 Yes, but it seems you're assuming he did proofreading and should have caught the error. What comes to mind: all those emails where I wrote "The document is in the attachment", proofread it, and clicked send, only to get a response "Ahem, attachment is missing" or – if I was very observent that day – to have to send an immediate "sorry forgot the attachment" followup.

People are fallible; Charity principle; Hanlon's razer; Occam's razor; Do onto others; etc.
Also, without defending the things he has done, the law was served, and seems to have been adequately satisfied. He did not repeat the offense ever since, and he certainly shouldn't be made to preface every single thing he does with his complete history – that's an abhorrent thing to do (again, in cases where the offender "paid their dues"... but then again, I'm an European; and US-ican sensibilities [since most commenters are from USA] are often, frankly, not "sensible" to us).

Now, if he was giving advice on what type of company to start et cetera, then I'd might consider it a potential reason for disclosure, but only once at the start, and not every single time.

Additionally, that was 30 years ago, people change. If I can "painfully cringe" at my choices or writs from 15-20 years ago from the perspective of now (late 30s) and not be overly willing to re-live nor re-hash it, I am certain he is capable of the same. There is also the biological fact that every act of remebering - or just time itself - can change/deviate/color our memories from what factually happened; and the longer and more actively one lives, the stronger the effect (in my experience).

(Comment tone properties to apply for the whole of the above: neutral, non-emotional, conversational.)

So he was 14 years old when he started the company?


I think I know how to become an autistic millionaire now with this video

Scam people (Dave Plummer) or become a right wing transphobe and change the name of a popular social media app (Elon Musk)

I wonder what I’m gonna end up doing with my life


everybody gangsta until Enderman drops a 30 min video


Why does every single crusty piece of trashware come with a stupid CGI product box on the download page?

They still do that with legit software like Eset antivírus (NOD32)

@loganmacgyver2625  another example is FL studio, which you can actually buy the box at some places

Because historically software used to come in big boxes, usually with a CD or bunch of floppies. Including the "big box" or an image of it gave a sense of "trust" because the company could afford to package their software in the "big box"? Even though there is no physical box to speak of? Maybe some kind of psychological trickery.

@@loganmacgyver2625 >antivirus
>legit

all antiviruses are snakeoil and cant do anything 2.5 brain cells can also do


damn, well, this kinda changes changes my idea of him<br>also, i somehow didn't know he was that rich, i knew he was, but not that much

damn, well, this kinda changes changes my idea of him
also, i somehow didn't know he was that rich, i knew he was, but not that much

The lawsuit against him by State of Washington was well-reported locally when it was happening.   By any standards, it was a micro-scam.  Dave Plummer is worth between $1 million and $5 million according to several online searches, I am not sure how accurate that estimate is but, that is what comes up.  If correct, that indicates he is comfortable but is not jetting the Hollywood set or rubbing elbows with Bill Gates.

he seems to be so rich that he needs to tell everyone about it... smh

yeah i assume most of the early MS guys are multi-millionaires (many times over) from the stock options alone. He even said he was spending 1mil per month on this adware nonsense and "sometimes it was profitable but on months that it wasn't, it was expensive burn" so he clearly had many millions to play with

@@kneel1 Yet all sources I could find has him worth $1 to $5 million, which is comfortable but not all that rich by today's standards.


I believe people can change, but that's gonna have to start with him acknowledging this and apologizing, and by the looks of it, I don't know if that's gonna happen...


cant wait for fanboys to start commenting he didnt do anything wrong :\


"hey pwease buy me" 🥺 was just too funny😂

can you give me the timestamp? when he said that


I've noticed that he is starting to remove comments, a comment asking him to address his past got over 100 likes and suddenly disappeared within less than 30 minutes. Hopefully his past will come back to his present and he will finally respond and acknowledge it.

Me! It could have been mine. I commented 15 minutes after he posted. Though im sure theres more


10:38 BrotherSoft? Vargskelethor Joel stumbled upon this in a Windows Destruction stream while deliberately looking for viruses. Holy crap.


"no no no, you see I didn't scammed people for this dope af garage. I've just written the task manager, the explorer, the IE, the entire OS so MS gave me a lot of money for my work"


finally something that isnt being a pdf file

why are you so relieved about the topic not being a pedophile expose?

you got something to hide yourself?

also what's with you and a lot of others self-censoring the word pedophile as if its a racial slur?

and if its not the former, why are you so tired of such discussions, quite frankly we need more of them because, just like people who conspire against the regular person to usurp their rights as a human, they get worse the more we leave them alone.


Dave plumber should at least admit to what he did.

yeah he did to a court of law 20 years ago, lmfao

@@Coldsteakyet his fanbase doesnt know of such a thing.


Bro, good english evolution! Still a lot of room to evolve, more specifially, the gradual "sliding" between accents. I had the same problem, when after a couple of minutes of speaking my accent suddenly became russian.

the best way to evolve it further is to just by talking to people<br>thats how i got a slight irish

the best way to evolve it further is to just by talking to people
thats how i got a slight irish

@@scarm_runesame, i got a small British accent just by watching YouTube lol


I really enjoy your accent, it just added so much charm to the video hearing the ways you say words. I liked it


At around 6:00 you talk about registry edits that change certain things about the way networking works, currently people are still falling for that with fortnite regedits being sold for over $100 in some places.


He seemed really nice from his videos, people change but trying to act like this never happened is not the way


We all knew he was prick when we saw he worked on product activation


Actual Heros don't exist. Dave is another example


4:20 ram defragmentation is a thing, because lets say you have 4k free but its fragmented, youd fail to allocate am 4k buffer even though there is 4k of ram free.

well, as long as you do have fragmentation because of gaps that are less than virtual page sizes, then yes. HOWEVER, if you do the defrag, any realloc would instantly create a new gap. Yeah I guess it's not big deal, but... there are pros and cons. Highly doubt it even made any sense, maybe on a system running for a lot of time with software that constantly allocates and deallocates a lot of memory (like more than usual apps back in the day).

No, RAM fragmentation (more correctly heap fragmentation) is a thing, it's an inherent issue in many applications, but you can't achieve RAM defragmentation by an application on Windows, for the fragmentation that the same application hasn't itself caused. The claim of the software is untrue.

@@SianaGearz i’m unclear on something, is the software claiming to defragment the virtual memory of each program running, or all the memory at once?

@@antmoundsock1122  "Defragments your physical RAM" is the advertisement claim. Nonsensical as it is.

@@SianaGearz ok that doesnt make sense then, I assumed he was defragmenting the positions of virtual memory which would make sense, but you couldn’t just look at a chunk of ram and defragment it, you’d need to know the position and size of all the different buffers.


I  am sorry but i laughed at the increase download speeds by 600%

That kind of worked, because it joined two or three concurrent dowloads from different parts of the file. So what this means is for example, that you have one download starting from the start of the file and another download starting from the middle of the file, and when they're both done, the file has been downloaded. But doing so simultaneously did increase download speed, it is just that it wasn't by that much. So, on a 56k modem, which had around 2-3kb/s, this would mean something like 3-4kb/s instead. Now, there was a lot more noise on the lines and other things which made download horrible already, and there is always an overhead, so the download speed was generally a lot lower like at around 3-4kb/s, which means the increase would have been even less noticeable. Notice, that an increase from 3kb/s to 4kb/s is actually an increase in speed of 33% (so the improved speed is 133%).


Actually, "fragmented" objects in memory are slower to access due to cpu caches, look up stride patterns. Though I doubt his utility would help with this at all and it was before superscaler cpus

This is typically managed by writing efficient code and choosing appropriate data structures rather than defragmenting RAM.

@@XAMEREN yeah as I was saying his program couldn't fix that, if it did then it'd have to change every pointer in memory or remap the virtual memory


And there I thought it was bad that I found the code to his "flaming LED strip" microcontroller on a random image board dated years back, almost verbatim.


honestly, I always knew he was lying about pretty much everything, I just like listening to stories (that aren’t even true probably)


the false copyright strike in the corner


i reccently started watching dave and now you upload this video. i'm not saying dave should be cancelled for this but it is pretty funny. if anything he should be more open about it and not hide it.

He is censoring it, he should be cancelled for censoring it.

@@ngspace9829What sucks is there are probably technical things that Dave could explain to make the situation look better. Buts hes just deleting stuff


To be honest, there's nothing too bad here. Crappy shareware, but as long as you can remove it - it's probably fine.


Found guilty and paid 300k dolars in fines


When you listen to his video, it's like he made Windows by himself ..


i did NOT expect seeing this in my feed today


lol someone re-registered the certified safe downloads domain yesterday, 7-23-2024

I looked at USPTO's trademark database and haven't found anything yet.

For those who are curious to look for themselves.

https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-information


There are many Malware YT review channels, and while most do a good job, I haven't seen many go in-depth with breaking down apps using SRE tools like IDA, Binary Ninja, or Ghidra. John Hammond is a notable exception, although his focus is primarily on Java, Python, VBS, and WScripts. I've been a reverse engineer and developer for 25+ years, so I appreciate seeing the 'under the hood' analysis. This isn't criticism of other channels, but a preference for a deeper technical dive in malware analysis.


people getting exposed left and right makes me think god is solely going after my enjoyment

@@MattSuguisAsFondAsEverrr this year is the natural selection year

Is this really him getting exposed, this happened like 20 years ago, all the guy does these days is share his history and knowledge of old Microsoft stuff. He already lost a court case over this, again 20 years ago, i assume you've never made any bad decisions in your life? Its not like hes grifting for youtube money, his channels not very big and hes made a load of money already. Also he has talked about this before and didnt seem especially proud of his actions.

@@CoreStarter He actually settled the case and had much of the penalties suspended for compliance.


WOW!
I think that was the very software that made me ditch Windows around 2001 and shift to Linux. I have been using Linux for everything since then.
I still hear/see/read people say that you can't use Linux for everything, - well I do.


Interesting i guess. Most people could care less. I certainly don't. He pumps out informative content that's entertaining. Well done in compiling all this info, although I would have liked to see a deeper dive into reverse engineering what the software actually does. For instance you gloss over net turbo saying it only changes a few registry values. Mtu etc  Ok, so for a non technical person, there is no value in that? Mark Russinovich and David Solomon do a really good explanation of what mem defrag scam is, and why it's such a bad idea. I dunno man, whilst i agree the business practices were definitely shady , this whole video just feels a little 'cancel culture'-ish.  Will be interesting to see if Dave directly responds to this. Popcorn at the ready.

I agree there could be value in tweaking the registry values for a non-technical person, especially in the 90s. But that's pretty scummy, he could have made a blog post explaining the parameters or something along the lines being a former MS employee. Instead, he charged people for that. I intended this to be sort of a malware showcase video, so nothing overly sophisticated. I don't want to cancel Dave or banish him off the Internet, this video is intended to show a piece of information that's often overlooked. It's hard to understand in my mind, because had Dave not been caught, he'd for sure be scamming people until it stopped generating revenue, but he was, so now he has to hide it. I also am eagerly waiting for his response, because that was the primary motivation behind uploading this video.


It's been almost 20 years... And it's not like he hasn't been through the justice system for it. I guess it was atleast interesting to watch


Oh btw I actually prefer this way of a documentary more than coffeezilla. Seems simpler and less of a narrative, You got straight to the point!


the memory management was probably something useful in 9X era where XP did not need it. I have a m68K mac and it needed ram defrag which was build into system 7 of mac os back then.


22:05 Well the thought that InternetShield would write something to the hosts file was a well educated guess, but seeing that it didn't, I think that leaves us two options:
1. Maayybee it failed to update the hosts file because it was already in use by Notepad - bit misleading from you on that part if that was the case, but that also points out the negligence of the author of the program that they did not make the error handling on the hosts write file error, not even a simple check if the file is already in use. Perhaps they didn't think anyone would have looked at the hosts file while using their software?
2. There's another place where you would do the kind of blacklisting of the websites - the Windows firewall. Instead of blocking the domains in the hosts file, it would instead add all 20 IP addresses that the domains of 'potentially harmful websites' would resolve to in a block Outgoing and Incoming traffic rules. And if the program genuinely does what it tells you it does, I am fairly confident it would just add the firewall block rule to 20 of those IP addresses.

22:05 Well the thought that InternetShield would write something to the hosts file was a well educated guess, but seeing that it didn't, I think that leaves us two options:
1. *Maayybee* it failed to update the hosts file because it was already in use by Notepad - bit misleading from you on that part if that was the case, but that also points out the negligence of the author of the program that they did not make the error handling on the hosts write file error, not even a simple check if the file is already in use. Perhaps they didn't think anyone would have looked at the hosts file while using their software?
2. There's another place where you would do the kind of blacklisting of the websites - the Windows firewall. Instead of blocking the domains in the hosts file, it would instead add all 20 IP addresses that the domains of 'potentially harmful websites' would resolve to in a block Outgoing and Incoming traffic rules. And if the program genuinely does what it tells you it does, I am fairly confident it would just add the firewall block rule to 20 of those IP addresses.

It seems to be putting the "bad" sites (whatever they are) in the "Restricted Sites" zone in the IE settings. This is visible on the settings screen at 22:18.

@@lowlymarine451 I thought I'd remembered something about that and figured that would be somewhere else to look.  Not unreasonable for someone to miss some crusty old feature in windows XP. :p


Too bad he didn't make Bonzi Buddy, he did show how to compile dos 4.0


I'm taking this in a direction where I'm thinking of him as an opportunistic person and a bit of a scumbag, but if I see a video from him in recommended, I would still watch it if it interests me. Like, the guy scammed a lot of people out of their hard-earned money, but didn't cause lasting damage and stopped doing it a long time ago. Heck, I used to believe cleaning up the registry sped up my PC so when CCleaner had that feature, I used to run it on my PC. Him trying to silence that part of history makes sense, as he doesn't want to associate with this dark part of his past. Still, not defending his actions or the fact he's not even trying to come clean about this but blocks/removes any mentions of this.

yeah i feel like this isnt a "never go online again" thing more of a "stop hiding it and come clean apoligize" type thing


jesus. the davesgarage unit? JESUS FUCK!

I can’t say I’m that surprised after getting celebrated Elon Musk making money by breaking the law and paying out less than he made from the crime overall. That made me think twice about him.

@@Barnacules He celebrated elon musk?? Would've dropped him if I heard that

@@Barnacules What's with all your activity here?  He settled the case over 18 years ago; what ever happened to forgiveness?

@@MarkHall-cf6ji He settled over 18 years ago.  Does your car insurance raise your rates because you had a ticket decades ago?  Or do they have a degree of forgiveness?

@@soundspark this was a lot more serious than a ticket, he actually took advantage of people, what makes it worse is he didn't need to, he was a microsoft engineer, dude wasn't starving

@@MarkHall-cf6ji You were told to be outraged 18 years later by a Russian, right?

@@soundsparkHe keeps lying about it. That doesn’t warrant forgiveness.

@@soundspark the russian didn't make up the lawsuit

@@automatedinsanity lmaooooooo. Your comment is 10/10.

@@soundspark Forgiveness only happens if you do something deserving of forgiveness.  If you keep lying about it, it shows you haven't learned, therefore you don't get forgiveness.

@@excessivelysalty_81 Where does he "keep lying" about it?

@sounspark Hello Dave's alt. Try repenting first.


If we start digging into every mainstream streamer or influencer's past (and present!) out there... who's clean anyways? If everything else he says is true, if he worked at Microsoft for real and did everything he claims to do, I don't care if he was a scammer. I mean, that's the least I would expect from a Microsoft employee lmao. Have you seen what their company is doing now? I would be more concerned if he was doing that right now.

but not everybody in a compagny is necessary agree with what the compagny do so not necessaraly evil....

The problem is, he DIDN’T do everything he claimed to do.


such a shame, used to really love his videos

istg july 2024 so many big newses are coming out


given how bad Windows uninstallers are, an honest, not scammy registry cleaner would be nice even if it gave no performance improvement.

It would be konda hard to do it legit<br>But i need to look at it

It would be konda hard to do it legit
But i need to look at it

It seems to bé a legit one call <br>Little-registery-cleaner FOSS but hasn't been update since 8 years

It seems to bé a legit one call
Little-registery-cleaner FOSS but hasn't been update since 8 years

@@redstone0234 yeah that does make sense, you would have to be super careful as to not just... nuke half the registry.


2:14 I just looked back at the video he made, he's left comment saying that apparently they replaced his method with the bitmap but the NTSUR release did use his method.


At least I can trust you, right Enderman?

hmmm . i am not sure ... double check information is important

idk you should "trust" anyone who talks on the internet.

Might steal your blocks but that’s about it

I make mistakes sometimes! 😁 Make sure to verify the information

@@Endermanch What's your opinion of your leader?


Damn. Now we found the origin of the modern Indian scareware scam sites 😮


Good content to watch after a long day.
Glad that I could help with finding the remains of Plummer's site.
-gaber samir jr


Something about him was… strange.
I watched him, yet I felt like something is not right.
Now I know that my gut feeling was completely right.


i'm pretty sure dave himself didn't make registry optimizer and other rogues, but it's still bad to feature and promote buying them on his site.

I'm on the fence, as a CTO how much code do you think he really wrote at this company by this point? I'm not saying he didn't have a hand in things, but rarely do management have a hand in everything that is going on.


Wow, I havent watched Enderman in a long time. I didnt expect a random voice reveal 😂

He's been making videos with his voice, just maybe not as much lately.

I honestly like the voice videos better.


This has been on my mind all day.  I'm sure all these things are true.  I guess I'm ultimately puzzled about what you hoped to achieve with this video.  Like...  Is it consequential?  What is the expected outcome?

I made this video to shine the light on his past, it sort of puts his work into context. His Autistic Millionaire book is twisting the reality, he keeps on ignoring any public talk about this. This was also made for him to respond to, ideally, with a story on how he came to be a scammer.

I have not read his book.  Having been diagnosed with autism myself, I was always put off by his boasting about it, I skip those videos.  It is classified as a disorder for a reason and I see no benefit in glorifying it.  I don't think it's my kind of read.  I'm only interested in technical subjects and quality fiction, and this sounds like neither.

What is Dave's motive for the channel and social media?  Book sales?  Are you trying to bring down his book?

@@rootbeer666 you could say so, because his book misrepresents what actually happened. I don't know Dave's motive for his channel, but he's mainly playing off his clean reputation. Everyone knows him as the Windows man online. I've been ignored by Dave on Twitter for quite some time about this case, and when he responded it wasn't about it at all. He avoids talking about it, so I'm trying to squeeze out an appropriate response from him.

@@Endermanch I'm rather doubtful he will contradict the text of his book.  It would be a net negative for him to respond.

I guess your video has value as a fact check for his story.

@@rootbeer666Journalism should be done for the sake of journalism. If theres something to report on, it should be reported

It seems disengenuos to ascribe any other ulterior motives without evidence


Damn, this sucks. His channel had some valuable retro computer information.

Oh well, I guess never trust a neighbor who worked with Microsoft.

His videos are all scripted so the content and information is solid in most of them so long as he’s not bragging about something he created. So there is no harm in still enjoying those videos. But, don’t believe him when he tells you how he made his fortune. That money came from people that were tricked into giving it to him.

@@Barnacules Unexpected to see you here. Been subbed a long time :)

@@Crispe1Official Yeah. He has been replying to a lot of comments.

There are <i>tons</i> of retro computing channels that go in to more depth about things.

There are _tons_ of retro computing channels that go in to more depth about things.

just read Raymond Chen's blog for a more "trustworthy" source. I certainly believe that guy. He usually shares code on his posts.

@Barnacules Just tell people with autism are smarter than people without. Except chris chan.


~10:00 -- RE: registry cleaner scams. I've been seeing those since I was in high school (my first windows was 3.11, so that should give you a hint about how long these have been happening).

My suspicion is that this scam goes back to the old Windows 3.11 registry which, if I recall correctly (I may not) was, if I recall a .ini file and COULD suffer issues with running out of space and having too many keys having to do with the limits of the .ini format. I think 95s unique brokenness also could have issues with too many registry folders, but NOTHING since XP has needed nor wanted a "registry cleaner". Issue is, like American politics, we have WAAAAYYYY too many people stuck in the early 90s operating off out of date technical information that didn't know WHY that original advise existed or was even needed.

~24:00 -- the memory doubler is a total scam and goes back, I beleive, so the SoftRam/MagnaRam PUP from windows 3.11 (which I fell for back in the 90s...) So good to know Dave fell back on the classics...

ok, CPU Rocket is a slightly different scam, but same concept: the program's "magic" does impossible things to your computer -- this time to your "scheduler" -- to "speed it up". Where as Magna Ram claimed to "double your ram via compression" (it didn't, think one of it's contemporaries tried, and failed, but it only opened a popup and tweaked some basic registry settings that you could do for free).


Time to remove task manager and replace it with process hacker.


My $0.02: we all enjoy his videos. He may not be 100% correct in all he says, but he is highly entertaining. Love his computers, retro stuff, etc. He was not some murderer or what not, just a guy who found a not super clean way to make money. However, he got sued, paid a huge fine, and all this is way past statute of limitations as it happened way too freaking long ago. Internet was a wild place then, there were much worse companies who did much worse things and a lot of shareware was just like this. Heck Starbucks steals 2/3 of our $6 drinks every day just by adding ice. No one is bothered.

Paid a fine and remained in severe net gain. Sounds fire to me, let's scam some old ladies online


something bad happens in 2004
People in 2024 with cancel culture : it's show time!

*something bad happens in 2004*
People in 2024 with cancel culture : it's show time!

Yeah, I don't disown people for their past.

No reason to jump on a bandwagon because it's the exciting new drama.

Everyone has a past history someone dislikes, but you don't drill people you meet on their lives...


This might be the biggest year for lost media, exposals, discord, youtube, and more...<br>especially the exposals part-

This might be the biggest year for lost media, exposals, discord, youtube, and more...
especially the exposals part-


I’d keep watching if he made a proper video giving background info and apologized (assuming he’s allowed to talk about it legally), I’m sad, that’s one of my favorite interesting channels. Also, there are some aspects of this video that seem overblown

Some? Almost all are overblown. He may have done some questionable things in the past and may have published some inaccuracies in the present, but this video is the definition of trying hard to portray someone as evil.

@@YS_Production oh yea, that man ain't evil at all.. what are we talking about? Just a million satisfied customers that purchased his software and never returned... man, how can anyone portray this guy as evil? He just sold sharewares

What? He literally scammed people saying that his crap made computers faster.


Ah man, what a shame. I thought better of him until you opened my eyes on this


Another youtuber I liked is exposed for being a turd. Just great.


I've watched a few of his videos, I didn't know about any of this, so thanks for spreading awareness


Tbh if he was open about it and told this story alongside others on his channel, a lot less people would care purely because of how long ago this all happened<br>He may very well be a changed man, and regret doing this, but hiding/defending it doesn't really make an impression of change or regret

Tbh if he was open about it and told this story alongside others on his channel, a lot less people would care purely because of how long ago this all happened
He may very well be a changed man, and regret doing this, but hiding/defending it doesn't really make an impression of change or regret


Something about writing a book titled “Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire” never sat right with me.  Lacks any humility whatsoever.


Well not watching him anymore thank you.


Download this before it gets struck down, god damn

If he takes down the video, that would serve as an admission of guilt

@@zoomdiamondifylike the court documents?

Oh come on... The dude doesn't need money. Why would he even bother to go through that?


4:31 On some old systems, it served a slightly different purpose: they could only store files as continious parts of the memory, so there were situations where one couldn't save a file that was too large although enough space had been freed up, and it was used as a workaround


enderman just entered his hbomberguy era

@@yoymate6316 nah, he's not insufferably smug enough for that.

Only time until we get a two hour video on Windows that involves Tommy Tallarico (his mother is very proud)


Thanks for sharing, never thought this guy was a scammer back in the day

Well... the thing is, if you compare to how companies function today, he is like an angel. I cannot really think of a tech company which is not scamming. What about the companies which make ink jet printers, and then fill less than what they say in the cartridge, and block you from using the cartridge even it is full after a certain date so you have to buy new ones? Not even google is honest anymore, they have gotten completely off the rails, and they were actually a very trustworthy company back then when they said Do no evil. I think more that dave might have been ahead of his time of what is happening today, the methods companies use today are absolutely infuriating. But I do agree that he should respond to the allegations. I don't tend to make decisions on people without having both sides.


A 30 minute long video? This is going to be interesting to watch.


This is somewhat similar to what norton av does, with all their extra addons that will make your pc "better". Why aren't they getting sued?


That old man seems so arrogant, i can smell stinks just from few of his videos (especially from ZIP stuff he told).


first time I'm actually on time for a premiere


awwww he seemed so nice. I thought the worst crime he did was making too many videos on the same subject


Well at least he's still far less evil and better than Adobe

Adobe looks up from that bar to hell believing it is heaven.


damn, I really thought he was genuine D:


I think the thing about "defragmenting" RAM probably referred to trying to make all of the free memory as contiguous as possible, so larger memory allocations wouldn't fail. It probably just allocated a bunch of memory until the OS paged everything else to disk and then freed everything it allocated when its requests to allocate more memory began to fail, leaving all of the free memory contiguous (except for anything that couldn't be paged out to disk). This could be helpful on a machine without much RAM, and calling it "defragmenting" the physical memory actually wouldn't even be misleading in that case. Saying it makes a machine feel like it was just rebooted sure is misleading though because the aforementioned defragmentation process wouldn't do anything about all of the leaked handles and other internal Windows accounting information that piles up over time.

Different things here.

Memory is fully virtualised in Windows (95+) so whether it's contiguous or not doesn't matter. It is managed pagewise, applications receive it pagewise, and paging happens pagewise.

There is such a thing as memory fragmentation but it happens within individual applications within their unique address space, within their pages, you can't just rescue it externally.

Sometimes, allocations fail by bumping into commit limit. It can be often avoided by allocating memory slowly enough and allowing the system enough time to grow the pagefile, which also bumps up the limit.

It's guaranteed misleading. The run of allocating, dirtying, waiting for paging to catch up, and then releasing to clear memory will not create a contiguous empty RAM space, but it also doesn't matter, since applications have no awareness of physical RAM.

The tangible benefit of the application would be, after paging out already loaded applications, a new application which loads a lot of data from disk will load quicker and feel smoother. It is even quicker than letting the system page out while the application loads, because the disk pressure of loading in data and writing out pagefile data don't end up fighting each other and creating extra disk head seeking. Remember we didn't have SATA NCQ back then. I think by giving the application plausible sounding but untrue promises he could command a higher price for an application.

I think there is hardware block for it in cpu (MMU - Memory Management Unit). It basically map continuous spaces to certain block sized areas in physical memory.


He claims to be autistic, which he may be, but one thing is for sure.. the blatant self-promotion and claiming to be the sole author of numerous parts of windows.

I mean, I am sure he contributed some code, but he comes off the same way that stolen valor scammers sound.

I've stopped watching his videos because of the constant chest puffing


Great story I think I even saw one of these programs myself back then


"im gonna do some evil thing 😈👿😈" ahh scam

Edit: Wow 50 likes, im impressed!


20 to 25 years ago computers would more regularly slow down and become un usable so people like Dave sold scamware. I as a child went around making family and friends computers faster by removing junk programs, stopping unnecessary programs from staring on login, running disk cleanup and defraggimg hard drives and this started my IT career.

So I guess in one way I can say Thanks Dave lol.


The Internet allows anyone to bring back anything from someone's past that makes them look bad.  It happens a lot in politics and it happens a lot in various media industries.  Spheres of influence have great power to cause detriment to others.
Please take care in deciding whom to talk about and how you talk about them.
Otherwise, great points.

It also means be careful when making these because if you say something incorrect it can come back and bite your ass

it is often said that, good deeds are often unpaid in attention, (and vice versa.)

the archival of incriminating evidence is merely a reflection of that. it has nothing to do with ruining someone's current life, as theyve already ruined it themselves long ago, the archives just present the evidence and nothing more.

if one truly wanted to shed their bad past, then they must exert the effort necessary to do better than that, and in this case.. the person in question does not seem to be doing so.


From coding Task Manager to becoming a Scam Manager 😮


Honestly, I got a dislike for him right away after every piece of video he did about open source software is to shill microsoft. During the XZ fiasco, all he did is make a video saying windows is better because it's controlled by microsoft and arguing about closed vs open source instead of discussing about the XZ itself and ways for the open source community to prevent it, maybe sharing his experience at MS and how to implement the good technique they used their into an open source development. But no, he just focus on the closed vs open source debate again, which honestly, as someone who both grow up with Linux and use Windows, both of them sucks and great in their own ways.

Yeah, but open source software would surely benefit from more trough reviews of updates or included libraries.

I cannot remember him saying closed source was better? Or even MS was better? It's a few months ago, but I thought he did explain the problem with xz correctly. Opensource people don't receive money or the protection they deserve, especially when it's used by a lot of people.

@@dashcharger24 he has said closed sources better simply because of the fact he feels that The ability to analyze for exploits is easier on open source products. And that is true! However, he also went into an explanation on why open source is great.

He gave both sides of the story in that comment, and that was mysteriously left out of this conversation...


It's like retiring from working on TF2 to host TF2 bots, a thing that goes against your previous job that also gives you less money


I mean it could be worse. He could have been the kind of file that Adobe Acrobat opens.


That registry fixer upper I didn't think was so bad tbh, but intercepting the restart button... that's terrible.<br>I enjoy Dave's videos these days - but this was certainly an eye-opener into his past

That registry fixer upper I didn't think was so bad tbh, but intercepting the restart button... that's terrible.
I enjoy Dave's videos these days - but this was certainly an eye-opener into his past


This guy always struck me as a fraud. He made a video talking about how there is no NSA backdoor in windows which is blatantly false. He could have just decided to not speak on it but he went out of his way to run cover for microsoft. Not a genuine guy

The real backdoor was just SMB1. Back then during the 56k modem age, you basically exposed your filesystem (and a couple processes) to the internet, if you had no firewall.<br>God the 2000's were horrible.

The real backdoor was just SMB1. Back then during the 56k modem age, you basically exposed your filesystem (and a couple processes) to the internet, if you had no firewall.
God the 2000's were horrible.

Do you have evidence that Microsoft had deliberately backdoored Windows for the NSA?

@@Sypakait was a different time. I still remember WIndows XP by default the firewall was disabled, because most people were worried about resources instead of security.


FYI TCP/IP has "protocol" in its name ;-)
The only thing that can be used to accuse Dave Plummer is the marketing via fear of non-technical customers.
Analysing these tools to find out, what they really do, would be interesting.

And force installing adware with CPURocket. I know networking well, and TCP/IP is a protocol stack, despite having 2 protocols in its name.

@@Endermanch And making uninstalls hard and misleading, as mentioned in the documents about the lawsuit.


Defragmentation of ram was a bit of a thing. In low memory machines, a crappy memory allocator in combination with a process that allocated lots of small ram chunks could result in your memory map being fragmented into lots of little bits that were useless. it was mostly history by the time of good memory management units built into hardware, so I'm not defending his product in the 2000s, but it was definitely a thing at one point in computing history. I have no idea if his product helped or not.

Also, net speed boosting was absolutely a thing. Often a badly configured tcp stack would be lacking things like compression turned on, and a lot of ISPs supported compression. You could see some boosts for plain text downloads like nntp, smtp and simple html pages. The claims of his product were probably nonsense other than turning on that compression flag tho.

Only memory fragmentation is still a real problem. And that is why most of the long-running server aplication do not use default memory allocator. Most commonly used is jemalloc (choice of Facebook and was choice of Rust) or TCMalloc (used by Google).

Was gonna say "nice pfp" but then I saw your About section

Hello!

@@mrlazda  By the time fragmentation has happened, it is generally too late to do anything about it. Both jemalloc and tcmalloc and various engineering advice like pools and frames as well as avoiding out-of-order operations cover fragmentation up-front avoidance rather than defragmentation.

Fundamental exception are virtual machine language runtimes which can just introspect all pointers going to something and don't give you raw pointer access; but the overhead of defragmentation would be so high that i'd struggle to name even one which actually does it.

Oh i know i can name one where it actually happens, Microsoft Basic on 8-bit computers. That one defragments. It's helped by not supporting references to begin with.

@SianaGearz  fragmentation of memory is always present when you have dynamic memory allocation. There is no way to avoid it. You can minimise the effect of it but will always be present.<br>Memory defragmentation can be useful in some cases from pure performance point, fragmwnted memory exhaust cache memory and  degrade performance so in some case it is beneficial to do memory defragmentation.

@SianaGearz  fragmentation of memory is always present when you have dynamic memory allocation. There is no way to avoid it. You can minimise the effect of it but will always be present.
Memory defragmentation can be useful in some cases from pure performance point, fragmwnted memory exhaust cache memory and  degrade performance so in some case it is beneficial to do memory defragmentation.


One time, i had to help the teacher, because the audio in the laptop was not working. What i just did was that i uninstalled Avast and it worked again.