A recent poll of everyone I know and the results are in:
100% of individuals, small businesses and large business people I speak with either have never heard of “Stay Smart Online” or have never used it! This link here (like others in recent times) are the first many will ever have clicked to go to this site. Looking at the 1.2M over 3 years that AusCert is getting to do this (their newsletters) to keep them in existence just seems wrong when everything is freely available on the Net and you could pay someone less than 40K per year (if that) to produce something easily of better quality! Gees, for a monthly newsletter of that quality, I offer our services to do it for 2K per month!!! We won’t try to hard to make it better than the stuff delivered now but even without trying, it has to be better. The stuff is pretty ordinary and no one reads it, but us tax payers are footing the bill for it!
AusCert? As I have said before, I don’t know what they do. All the people in the industry that I know, don’t know what they do…and some that have heard of them, think it is a conference on the Gold Coast each year. (Not that there is anything wrong with the Gold Coast for a piss-up junket! – I’ll give them that and nothing else!).
Related posts:
http://beastorbuddha.com/2008/09/12/governments-stay-smart-online-programany-value-anyone-there/
http://beastorbuddha.com/2008/06/06/stay-smart-online-latest-australian-government-initiative/
Hey, lets really get serious about this Internet thing (thanks lolwat and Darren Pauli):
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1399635276
Scary stuff – what confidence these guys know what they are doing?
With the start of GovCERT in Australia, AusCERT will find it more and more difficult to maintain a budget which means finding paying customers…. Why will the federal Government want to keep supporting AusCERT when they have their own CERT?
Going to have to have a word with my writing team from Upper Botobolar. They should have been on top of this topic. I suppose that’s the risk in outsourcing stuff like this. Some of the crap they’ve dished up lately – they’ll have to lift their game or I’ll be looking elsewhere. AusCert, Symantec, whinge, whinge, whinge…getting sick of it myself!
@ddrazic,
here at Upper Botobolar syndicated journos, we produce quality material, kind-of. You won’t ever hear us rant on about unraveling hex or machine-coded security flaws in Vista or Leopard (because we don’t know how to and we get easily bored).
Granted, our topics might be of highly questionable relevance, but our loyal readership base is proven.
For instance;
* Annoying the guru, Joanna Rutkowska – 806 hits
* Top Gear Australia or Flop Gear Australia – 441 hits
Now, our latest forum topic – “BMW drivers – save your scrotums”, I guarantee will set new highs in readership numbers…. And perhaps new lows in IT journalism.
So there you have it. Your readers have spoken !
