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No, it is the opposite of hand-wavy. It is a guy getting up on stage and performing an actual technical analysis in front of his peers, rather than posting an anonymous message board post insulting someone they presumably don't know.

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If he wrote a tool that broke up the decompiled stuxnet binary into n-grams and did principal component analysis, then used a a boosting classifier to put it in clusters of similarly machine-analysed code deemed by some group of experts to be "high," "medium," or "low" quality, that's an actual technical analysis. Its merits could be debatable, but it's technical.

If all we know is that he wrote a tool that found the code to be of fairly low quality, he got up on stage in front of his peers and waved his hands.

My judgment comes from the scant information in the article. I don't see his actual technical analysis, I see some claim that we can technically (mathematically) define code as good, fair, or poor, which sounds ridiculous.

You're cherry-picking my arguments anyway.

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