Stories by Mark Gibbs

It is one thing to be out on the street and randomly mugged, but quite another to have someone follow you home, trick you into letting them into your house, and then being robbed in your own living room.

"I hear his name bandied about a lot, but I don't know him. I don't know who Henson is. He seems to have his hand in a lot of things around here, but I don't particularly know what that means."

OK, so let's say you're interested in social trends. A great place to look at what's hot is Twitter and, yep, there's a service that will graph the popularity of any keyword on Twitter: It's called Trendistic.

Remember when Apple thought different? They wanted us to see them as being like us, their customers. They wanted us to believe we had similar values, goals and aspirations. They wanted to convince us that, with their help, computers would be different, life would be different, and we would be different. We would be happier, more productive, more fulfilled.

Many of my friends hate Apple. They hate Apple's arrogance and the way the company manipulates the market. A great example of what they despise: Apple recently kicked out all book reading apps other than its own nice-to-look-at-but-not-well-featured-and-doesn't-handle-enough-formats book reader, otherwise called iBook.

Gad! I complained a few weeks ago about frequent DNS lookup errors on my AT&T DSL connection. I tried using Google's DNS servers instead of AT&T's and, for a while, it looked like the problem was fixed. Alas, this was not the case …

The more I use the HTC Incredible, the more I like it. And the thing that really makes the Incredible, er, incredible is its operating system, Android<.

One of the most profound changes in how computing services are being delivered is the use of the Web as a frontend for just about everything. We have seen this transformation in the thousands of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that have appeared in the last few years that now cover the entire spectrum of applications from corporate accounting through to video editing (something that just a few years ago was hard to imagine becoming a reality).

Welcome to a New Year. For the US, 2008 saw our 401ks become 201ks, our worries about the price of gas come and go, our house values plummet, our economy implode and our IT budgets shrink. It was not a good year.

Is your network secure enough to fight off chocolate? The short answer: probably not.

Being "green" has become very fashionable. Along with that there's a lot more talk about behaving in ways that support our environment rather than our business-as-usual habits. But the problem with being green in practice is how much of our business as usual will we sacrifice to save ourselves?

Rules matter because they define how we get on with other people and what is considered normal