Mark Gibbs

Columnist Mark Gibbs asks his readers: Are you willing to act when you know of misbehaviour?

Until you have done a real accounting job that includes the big picture, you haven't saved the planet. At best, you've just built a green image and saved a few bucks

When you take a complex public-interest topic that concerns money and combine it with Big Comm and Big Politics, it is guaranteed there'll be enough spin to lift the whole mess into the stratosphere

Maybe there are a few companies out there that will make their software bug lists public, but will this ever become the norm? Probably not today, probably not tomorrow and probably never.

Skype and Vonage illustrate what is wrong with user communications: They are

It would be feasible to apply the attention-economy advertising model to pretty much any facility or service where users are looking to minimize their expenditure. Given the way the economy is going, that will apply to pretty much everyone and for everything.

Is full, public disclosure of security vulnerabilities a better strategy than trying to keep them secret?

What we can afford over the short term is the discovery of the most easily found failure modes. These modes are just those that are easily and therefore cheaply found (as in a few dollars each). To identify the next set of failure modes that are harder to find is more expensive and so on until we are spending the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Bolivia to find a single failure mode.