Backspin

By Mark Gibbs

The Sixth Annual Gibbs Golden Turkey Awards

11/16/09

Once again, the spotlight is on those who would make things just that little bit crappier for everyone in pursuit of some agenda only a crazy person would want.

The Craziness Pandemic, Part II

11/06/09

Last week I began documenting the pandemic of craziness that is sweeping the globe. This week, our attention turns to the United States where the net neutrality furor continues unabated with a huge outbreak of craziness being added to the mix.

The Craziness Pandemic, Part I

10/30/09

Gibbs has spotted a new pandemic sweeping the globe and there's no swine or birds involved; this one is an outbreak of craziness and the Japanese airline ANA appears to have had a bad case of it …

Windows 7 launch parties: Are we all mad?

10/21/09

Gibbs is astounded by Microsoft's campaign to get people to hold Windows 7 launch parties globally … a ploy that seems to have worked ridiculously well assuming that it's real … he also wonders about our collective sanity and coolness quotient.

Not one of my better days

10/19/09

Gibbs started on what he thought was going to be a simple job and most of a day later, he's ready to reprogram his computer with an axe

Bloggers beware: the FTC is watching

10/09/09

Mark Gibbs discusses the Federal Trade Commission's new rules on advertising that, for the first time, encompasses new media, and should you fail to disclose if you're being paid to post, makes you liable for big bucks.

Network neutrality: Doing the right things

10/01/09

Gibbs argues that the Internet is bigger than business and therefore needs to be seen as a core issue to our culture which means that network neutrality is needed if we are to collectively prosper.

Watching the detectives bowl

09/28/09

Gibbs follows on from last week's column on surveillance with a tale of cops caught on video in a house search, the state of video surveillance in the UK, and wonders if our operating systems might be rigged …

Surveilled to death

09/21/09

Gibbs ponders how much we're tracked and how much we give away and wonders what the long-term outcome will be; a society of closed lips and constrained behavior, a society economical with the truth, or will it just stay business a usual?

Dear Vendor …

09/14/09

Mark Gibbs writes an open letter to all vendors who don't get it and explains the errors of their ways and what they need to do if they want to get our business. Will any of them pay attention?

Federal IT strategy, hope over reality

09/07/09

Well, that ugly, ill-conceived bill from Senator Rockefeller, now called the "Cybersecurity Act of 2009", has reappeared and if it passes someone is going to get saddled with the job of making it happen. Who will be the lucky guy and can he succeed?

On excellence and best practices

08/24/09

Gibbs ponders excellence and with the help of a friend debunks best practices.

Suspicious activities and my grandmother

08/13/09

Mark Gibbs is suspicious about a lot of acronyms, to wit, ISE's NSIS that collects SARs that, at least in L.A., includes pictures or video footage "with no apparent esthetic value". His grandmother's words are brought to mind.

Cybersecurity: Curiouser and curiouser

08/10/09

Gibbs is an aficionado of Carrol's Alice and finds a curious parallel between the administration's cybersecurity office and believing six impossible things.

DRM's Slow Death. Sorta

07/31/09

Mark Gibbs ponders the slow death spiral of digital rights management as the RIAA almost admits that DRM is obsolete, as Amazon violates its terms of service and apologizes, as lawyers attempt to redefine what it means to buy digital content, and how the Associated Press has just discovered DRM.

Publish and be damned! Goodbye ethics

07/24/09

The recent theft of private documents belonging to Twitter management and their publication by a major blog could herald direction of online journalism: One that may turn out to be unethical and self-indulgent.

Internet Addiction? Shocking.

07/16/09

Gibbs ponders Internet Addiction Disorder, its prevalence in Chinese society, and the "treatment" some Chinese clinics have used to "cure" the afflicted. Tell your kids, they might feel lucky to live where they do.

Lost in LinkedIn translation

07/13/09

LinkedIn recently annoyed the president and membership of the American Translation Association by asking them if they'd be interested in translating LinkedIn's content. Mark Gibbs thinks they are making a montagna da una collina della talpa (that's Italian for a "mountain out of a mole hill").

Irrational rights

07/02/09

Mark Gibbs discusses the award of $1.92 million damages to the RIAA in the case of a single mother accused of pirating songs.

Great balls of customer service

06/19/09

Gibbs replays the experience of an unhappy cell phone customer and scans the news.

The Twitpocalypse Tragedy

06/12/09

Twitter could fail, this time big time, for technical reasons. Mark Gibbs has written a play, to be exact, a tragedy, about this. He probably won't win a Tony.

Cell phones! $#!&!

06/05/09

Gibbs continues his rant about cell phone service providers and customer disservice and wonders how we can afford to let what are critical communications be run by what is effectively a cartel that just wants to squeeze us for every last cent it can while providing, at best, mediocre service? Altogether now: "I'm mad as hell …"

Cellular customer disservice (can you say "argggh!?)

05/29/09

Mark Gibbs is trying to save money and so he looked for a less expensive cell phone service plan. He got his new phones but dealing with customer service … it's not a pretty story.

Willful technological ignorance

05/15/09

Mark Gibbs is irked by a GE marketing program that willfully uses the wrong name for a technology it uses. He sees this as symptomatic of a trend of needless inaccuracy about technology that just keeps us slightly dumber than we ought to be.

Cyberbullying? No, it's just bullying.

05/08/09

Gibbs discusses proposed legislation concerning "cyber-bullying" and points out that the laws would be a really, really bad idea and that that conflating "cyber" with almost anything is simply bogus. Dude.

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