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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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One of the advantages of regularly communicating with many people
in the local Net industry is that I get to know pretty quickly when a new
email worm or virus gets through the defenses of a company.
Every now and then I find my mailbox flooded with emails from the various
staff at a company -- each containing an attachment with a copy of the .VBS,
.EXE or other executable payload in which the malicious code is stored.
That's the way many of these viruses or worms work -- when some complete
cretin receives one of these emails and opens the attachment, copies of the
email and virus are usually sent to all the people in their address book.
Fortunately, what used to be a flood of these emails from naive or stupid
email users who keep my address in their address book has slowed to a bare
trickle these days.
To date, I've simply emailed anyone who has obviously been the victim of such
an attack and told them that they had a problem -- but now, having publicised
the folly of bad email practice and lack of anti-virus software so many times
I'm taking a different tack. It's now time to start "outing" those repeat
offenders who have clearly proven themselves to be so stupid and such a danger
to others that they don't deserve Internet access.
First on the list are the lovely people at
Strathmore.
Not only is their website but-ugly (if you think it looks bad in IE, just try
it in Nestcape!) but yesterday I received copies of the Mawanella worm
from one of the directors and the office staff.
My goodness -- if this is the best we can expect from a public company which
proclaims itself to be "one of New Zealand's leading technology venture
capitalists" then lord help the industry!
What's even more surprising is that this is certainly not the first time the
company has been hit by one of these email-borne viruses. I have a nice
collection of virus/worm-laden emails from them that I've accumulated over
the past few years.
Readers (and Strathmore shareholders) are invited to draw their own conclusions.
The Budget
After the government's repeated assurances (and some indication that promises
are being honoured) let's hope that there's some good news for entrepreneurs
and would-be technology start-ups in today's budget.
As someone who has already benefitted from one of the Technology grants
provided by the Ministry of Economic Development, I'm not about to grizzle
at the work that's been done to date.
I hope that the announcement I'm about to make within the next few days will
also prove that there is significant value for the government and the country
in providing this kind of hand-up for budding hi-tech entrepreneurs. This is
the kind of investment that can, and often does, pay very handsome returns.
Now comes the task of finding funding for the commercialisation phase, I think I'll give
Strathmore a miss eh? :-)
Wanna Buy My Shares In 7am.com?
I currently hold around 30% of the shares in
7am.com -- but I'm looking
to sell them to raise some cash for a new venture.
It's probably very difficult to assign a value to these shares (they're
not listed of course) but I'm realistic and open to offers.
Other 7am.com shareholders will have pre-emptive rights so acceptance of
any offer will be contingent on this.
Contact me if you're interested.
Free Tech/Net News
Looking for some free Tech/Net news for your website from 7amNews/ShockHorrorProbe?
The headlines and stories you see in the reddish box on this page are now available
for others to place on their own website -- free of charge. What's more,
for a limited introductory period, you can include the entire story within
your own pages so that people don't leave your site when they click on a headline.
Check out this page
for more information. Note -- this is in Beta test at this stage so please
report any problems.
Add Aardvark To Your Own Website!
Got a moment? Want a little extra fresh content for your own website or
page?
Just add a
couple of lines of JavaScript
to your pages and you can get
a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated
each and every week-day.
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and
have any problems.
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Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it
now!
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