Mark Gibbs

For more than 25 years, Mark Gibbs has done just about everything in the networking business short of hacking into NORAD. He worked as an executive in various companies, has created companies, and has consulted on product and service development for many businesses. As an author he has written four books and numerous articles about networking and computer technology. Gibbs has been a regular contributor to Network World since 1995 and pens (well, keyboards) the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns as well as the twice-weekly Web Applications Newsletter. He also writes a blog called, with amazing creativity, Gibbsblog. For more detail on the man behind the myth please see here.

Recent articles by Mark Gibbs

Let me get off your *&%$ list

May 11, 2012

Gibbs is irritated by the unsubscribe process of many commercial lists ..

Cool hacks: DIY cellphones and a magic trackpad rethink

May 09, 2012

There's something of the hacker in all IT people ... there has to be because you spend so much of your time figuring out how things work and how to fix said things when they break (which is usually far too often).

Thwarting employers asking for Facebook access

May 07, 2012

The rise in employers and schools demanding access to workers' and students' social media has to be stopped

An RDP client and a Smartphone 'Copter

April 25, 2012

Ah, what a week it's been. Ravelling the unravelled and fixing stuff I thought was fixed.

The government wants to know what it doesn't know

April 23, 2012

The government's increasing surveillance of us should make you very uneasy because they're determined to know what they don't know whether you like it or not

Google AROUND, network scanning, and pinging with TCP

April 19, 2012

We start this week with a real geek out: If you have ever had to weigh the benefits and tradeoffs of Apache as an application server (for example, using Tomcat vs. node.js ("a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications"), then you absolutely have to watch "Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech" (it's NSFW -- bad words). Make sure you watch all of it ... the end is great!

Microsoft, instead of turning the lights off on XP, make it open source

April 12, 2012

Microsoft just announced that some old favorites are going on Extended Support, Gibbs thinks after that, they should be set free

Two tools; One stable, one not

April 11, 2012

If you should have, as many of us do, a love-hate relationship with the PHP programming language but have yet to fully articulate what you don't like about it, then you need to read "PHP: a fractal of bad design" by "Eevee" who describes himself as "just some guy who loves hacking." An outstanding, exhaustive and exhausting rant!

Good Enough IT -- better than Old Skool perfect

April 09, 2012

Are you one of the Old Skool types to whom detail and quality really matter? Where you strive for (and maybe rave about) the need for standards and are appalled by sloppiness?

Five geek projects

April 06, 2012

At the end of last week I slipped on a wet floor, did a wild, balletic (or so I thought) attempt to recover, and wrenched my knee and leg. The next four days were a blur of X-rays and Vicodin. Luckily nothing broken, but I've had better weekends.