Cardfile.org just launched. It’s free. You create an account and enter your contact information and they provide an RSS feed that your friends can subscribe to so they’ll know when you change phone number, email address, postal address, IM account name, all that kinda stuff. They give you the HTML you need to stick on your site so your friends can get to your information easily. In addition your friends can download your contact information in VCF format. And if you can get your friends to sign up you can add them to your list of tracked contacts.

No, the idea isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t put the supplied HTML on any web page anywhere, for instance … at least not for my personal contact information. And there have been a lot of companies that’ve tried this in the past and died away. Hopefully they’ll listen to feedback and this one will stick cause the basic idea is a really good one.

Walmart‘s doing music downloads for 88 cents per track.

Woody’s Office Watch #8.50 has more examples of Word docs posted on the web with information stored in them that probably shouldn’t be there. Docs from the Department of Homeland Security, the Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, the Chief Security Architect from Dell (!) (some of the links will probably be dead or lead to docs that have had the information talked about removed — at least I hope so!). Names and ids of the folks who edited them are in there as well as the locations of the files on the users’ drive, not to mention complete revision histories!

Be careful. Think about what you’re doing. Pay attention.

Secunia has released SA10425 which describes a vulnerability in Opera which allows a malicious website to overwrite a file with a simple download operation. The solution? — upgrade to Opera V7.23.

It’s interesting that we see a lot of exploits for non-Microsoft products posted after their solution is available.

This posting to VentureBlog gives some insight into what (at least one) VC is thinking. Some excerpts:

“I frankly think that social networking is close to a zero sum game.”

“Relationships are maintained through interaction — we call, email, have lunch, etc.”

“It is conceivable that technology could make us more efficient
and therefore increase our universe of relationships (…) But I
believe that increase is marginal.”

In other words the free ride is over. Friendster, LinkedIn, tribe.net and the others need to find some way to provide value or face extinction. This isn’t uncommon. First-wave adopters have an advantage of being there (ahem) first but once the “ooo-ahh” has worn off, consumers will turn away unless they have a real reason to stay. It has begun. Within 3 months we’ll see the 2nd generation and, hopefully, they’ll actually have something to contribute.

… when you cut back. I’m probably “two” hard on them but the editors at Microsoft apparently didn’t check this KB article very carefully. For the “two” busy amongst us, read the CAUSE section carefully.

Intel has an online WiFi hotspot finder at http://intel.jiwire.com/index.htm. They say they’re verified which is good. Wonder how long it’ll last?

Another item from Scot’s December 4, 2003 newsletter. He’s launched a new Linux site called LinuxPipeline. News, info on applications and distributions. Bunches of stuff that professional Linux folks can use.

Courtesy of the December 4, 2003 issue of Scot’s Newsletter — an excellent newsletter that, unfortunately, isn’t published in RSS form.

ZDNet reports on this and you’ve probably already heard about it but it’s one of my worst nightmares — that an ATM gets infected by a worm. Of course, that begs the question of how the worm got to the ATM in the first place? Wouldn’t a responsible bank have the ATMs on an isolated network, firewalled separately from everything else?