On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 01:00 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 11:30 AM 08/05/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
I ran across a reference to this company, which says it has raised $20 M in VC financing and which claims it has a system which implements the digital equivalent of "disappearing ink." (Perhaps distilled from snake oil?) The URL is still called disappearing.com, but the company is now called Omniva Policy Systems. A URL is:
I guarantee that anything a human eye can read can be captured for later use, whether by bypassing the probably-weak program, by using other tools to read the mail spool, by capturing the screen buffer, or, if worst comes to worst, simply photographing the screen with an inexpensive digital camera and then either using the captured image as is or by running it through an OCR.
It's nice to see that they're still around, unlike so many dot.bombs.
Why is it "nice"?
The founder came and talked to Cypherpunks just after their PR launch (IIRC, Bill Scannell was involved in getting them into US today.)
No comment.
He started off by being very clear about what problems they were and weren't trying to solve. They were trying to solve the problem of making messages expire when all the parties involved are cooperating. He viewed the problem of preventing non-cooperating parties from saving copies to be unsolvable snake oil and he wasn't trying to solve it.
This may or may not have been what Jeff believed, or wanted to believe, or told you was the case, but I don't buy that this is their business model.. Their Web site is filled with stuff about how "Save" menus are subverted, so as to, they claim, make it impossible for copies to be saved, blah blah. This hardly fits with your view of a bunch of benign little bears all sitting around cooperating. Further, the site natters about how Omnivora will support government requirements about unauthorized persons seeing mail (how? how will even their crude expiry approach stop unauthorized viewings of mail?). This is again inconsistent with the picture of friendly little bears all cooperating. Friendly little bears don't need to have their "Save As" buttons elided (not that this will stop screen grabs and photos, as I mentioned). Nor would friendly little cooperating bears show their messages to "unauthorized viewers," now would they? (Speculatively, I would not be even slightly surprised if Omnivora is doing more than just nominally erasing some messages. To wit, storing copies for later examination by Authorities with Ministerial Warrants. As Jeff Ubois no longer seems to be attached to Omnivora, perhaps his vision was rejected.)
~~~~ In your other message, you mentioned that several Extropians were doing really squishy stuff, and mentioned that Jeff Ubois's resume also appeared to be.
Something called "Ryze" and something else called "Minciu Sodas." "Minciu Sodas is an open laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers. We bring together our individual projects around shared endeavors. We remake our lives and our world by caring about thinking. "Minciu Sodas helps your enterprise work openly to integrate constructive people around your purposes." Plus several other "advisory panels" and "boards" of, as you put it, "squishy" topics. But not as bad as the squishiness poor Max has gotten himself into, granted. There's a whole subculture of bottom feeders who think high tech needs some new version of Werner Erhard (originally born Nathan Goldfarb, or somesuch...there was a Jew with major self-doubt).