Sponsor's Message

I don't know about you but I've had just about as much as I can take of all the rhetoric, hype and endless promotion surrounding the battle between Bush and Kerry. It's filled our TV screens and most of the online news sites for weeks now.

But I fear that with our own elections just around the corner, the respite from all this stuff will be short-lived -- and that's a worry.

It's a worry because I see that our political parties have still to get totally to grip with the internet and its awesome power to communicate and irritate.

I've signed up to the regular newsletters of several NZ political parties, mainly in order to keep an eye on exactly how they're using the Net and how much they "get it".

Every week I get an email from parliament, one from Don Brash and one from the ACT party.

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So far so good -- except that this week my mailbox also received a rather unexpected message titled "1 page FAX received Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:44:02 EST" from nz/bractsr@mail.xpedite.com.au.

It hadn't triggered the spam filters and the 168Kbyte attachment wasn't an executable so I opened the email to check it out.

This offered no more information since the body of the message was empty, the entire message consisted of this massive graphic image.

Was this some kind of spam, trojan or phishing exercise?

Only one way to find out -- I opened the graphic file to take a look.

WTF?

It was a copy of ACT's weekly newsletter ("The Letter") which had obviously been sent through the services of an Australian service at www.xpedite.com.au.

But why?

I'd already received by emailed version of The Letter just a few hours earlier so there'd seem to be no point in wasting my bandwidth and mailbox space by burdening me with a giant graphic file containing exactly the same stuff.

Obviously this was a giant cock-up. Ready to run a country but can't run a mailing list eh?

But ACT are not alone in respect to their cyber-incompetence.

A few minutes after ACT's newsletter arrived, I also got my edition of Don Brash's newsletter from deep in the bowels of the National Party. In that email there was a link to Don Brash's own website.

Why oh why, in this newsletter, does Don promote the dot-com version of his website (DonBrash.com) rather than the more Kiwi DonBrash.co.nz?

Is this some indication of probable *much* closer ties to the USA should National win the next election I wonder?

But wait... there's more!

Don's newsletter also promotes the national part website at www.national.org.nz, so I thought I'd drop in for a look-see.

Here's what I look-saw.

Ready to run a country but can't run a website eh?

Maybe it was just a bad day in the world of politics on the Net -- let's hope it wasn't a hint of just how poorly our political parties "get" the Net and its importance to the future of this nation.

It will be very interesting to see just how much emphasis our politicians put on using the Net as a way of spreading their message next year. Let's hope they all understand the negative implications of spam.

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