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Mark Gibbs

Backspin

By Mark Gibbs

Comments to backspin@gibbs.com.

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The place to discuss Gibbs's columns.

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How to Ruin a Great Application
09/04/08
Xcelsius was a market-defining product, but sloppiness, neglect and ignoring its users could be its doom.
Vista: IT loves it, hates it
08/28/08
Seems that Microsoft Vista is both loved and hated in the IT world – which depends on who you’re listening to. Let’s find out what you really think.
Seinfeld and Microsoft: more proof that IT is crazy
08/22/08
Gibbs discusses how crazy the IT world is and highlights Microsoft marketing and its use of Seinfeld as evidence that it is completely insane.
Milli Vanilli, the Chinese, Apple and forgiveness
08/14/08
As with Milli Vanilli before them, the Chinese and Apple have breached our faith – the Chinese with fake fireworks and Apple with a secret back door into the iPhone. Who might we forgive?
Turning you into an actuary
08/08/08
E-discovery is big and getting bigger and you need to be doing it. The results will change you and your organization.
UCE, shouting into thunder
07/31/08
UCE, or unsolicited commercial e-mail, that makes you work to get it to stop is bad enough, but when it is flagrantly and unashamedly in violation of the law a whole new set of feelings come into play.
City of San Francisco management fails
07/24/08
That a San Francisco City network manager could become a 'rogue' and the city's network compromised is the fault of inadequate city management.
SCO and just desserts
07/17/08
SCO is in Chapter 11 and now must pay Novell over $2.5 million. Are we getting near to the end of the story?
Privacy and the red pill
07/10/08
Let's face it. Your privacy really doesn't exist. For a few bucks anyone can get the details of your life. What can be done to get our privacy back?
Top-level domains rethought
07/02/08
At ICANN's recent Paris meeting the board unanimously agreed to allow the creation of arbitrarily named top level domains by those with deep pockets. Gibbs thinks that this is not a good idea.
Privacy? Hah!
06/26/08
Continuing from last week’s Backspin Gibbs relates some user feedback and discovers that your data (and his) is available to pretty much anyone who wants to look at it.
Debt collectors mining your secrets
06/19/08
Gibbs gets a call from a debt collector and learns about skip tracing and the largely unregulated industry behind it.
Managing institutional memory
06/13/08
Companies have things they need to remember such as domain renewals but how can they remember them over years or decades?
Handling your product problems
06/05/08
When you have an application or service that you have rolled out to hundreds or thousands of people and you discover a serious problem what do you do? Are you a big boy about it or a weenie?
Evolving enterprise IT
05/29/08
Many enterprise IT shops are stuck with big, expensive systems and applications that e-fossilized into place. Time to make changes!
Windows Media Center RIP?
05/22/08
Microsoft’s Windows Media Center obeys the broadcast flag when it doesn’t have to, and consumers won’t be happy. This could kill off the Microsoft Windows Media Center product line.
The IT Curmudgeon cuts loose
05/15/08
The IT Curmudgeon has been quiet for too long. He’s been biding his time, waiting for the right moment to cut loose, but then he realized that in the world of enterprise IT there never will be a right time to vent his spleen and that there’s no time like the present.
WoW license spat could be trouble for IT
05/08/08
If Blizzard prevails in the case of World of Warcraft cheating software, licensing could become more complex.
Microsoft hack pack spells trouble
05/01/08
Microsoft has announced a suite of tools called COFEE that makes forensic analysis of Windows easier. This means that there is a whole universe of potential exploits just waiting to be found.
Knock, knock, it’s the FBI
04/24/08
In what appears to be an overzealous attempt to catch pedophiles the FBI has created “honeypot” links, but the consequences could be far reaching.
Fighting off strangers bearing candy
04/17/08
Users aren't naive, they are willfully ignorant. The latest installment of a experiment shows just how easily users can undermine IT security. Here's a summary of the survey and four ways to reduce the impact of user ignorance.
How will you own the customers?
04/10/08
The big opportunity for businesses is to “own” consumers, but to do so a whole new level of support will be required from IT.
Internet music tax, a bad idea
04/03/08
Warner Music is proposing a tax on Internet users to cover industry losses on illegal music sharing, but what it amounts to is a protection racket.
Politics and technology
03/27/08
A potential thin wedge of censorship shows that politics and censorship are intertwined and inseparable.
Reviewing your top IT hates
03/20/08
The recent Backspin column "My Top Eight IT Hates" got a lot of feedback. Here,s a selection of reader comments.

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