Gregory D. Evans - "125 Ways to Protect Your Personal Computer Short & Simple" 68% Plagiarized

Thu Aug 25 20:02:03 CDT 2011

In the book "125 Ways to Protect Your Personal Computer Short & Simple", the first page explicitly says "written by Gregory D. Evans" and credits William Fisher as "Co-author & Editor". This is notable as Evans has claimed that other plagiarized content was not his doing as he never claimed to write the content, only collect it. In "125 Ways ..", Evans provides 127 sections for protecting your computer. Extremely disjointed and repetitive in places (e.g., 1, 5, 7, 127 all deal with strong passwords), the book does not number the pages. The first edition is dated December 1, 2005 and contains a variety of material published by others between 2002 and 2005.

The Plagiarism

The following table details the portions of the book that were taken from other sources, making up 68% of the material. Information is included to distinguish not only plagiarized material, but also what was done in an attempt to obscure the original source (e.g., removing text or credit). This shows willful infringement of copyright and inexcusable plagiarism.

Due to time constraints, the first 25 out of 125 sections (most being one paragraph) were examined briefly via Google searches. 17 of the 25 sections checked were clearly plagiarized. A few sections could not be located via Google, but simply do not read as if Evans wrote them. They may be taken from print publications or other sources that have not been archived by Google. At least four sections appear to be written by Evans, based on the poor grammar and general style demonstrated by Evans over the years. For example:

• "Some of the spyware that is installed into your computer come in the form of a Trojan horse this is often detected by a virus program by sometimes can not be rid of, this is not a virus it is a form of spyware."
• "Another way to check for spyware is to use a program and let it build files then since you are not connected to the internet the computer will store the files to be sent in a folder some where on your hard drive you can run a search for new files that have been recently created."
• "Spyware has become very large that there are companies that have developed ways to prevent spyware from getting on your computer Norton's anti-virus has developed a firewall that helps prevent the intrusion of spyware as well as many of the anti-virus software have done the same.

Note: While sections 20 - 25 were found in a PDF dated December 9, 2005, and the first edition is listed as December 1, 2005, we do not believe that the Wi-Fi Alliance plagiarized content from Evans.