At 3:50 AM -0800 12/14/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
At 11:35 PM -0600 on 12/13/00, by way of believer@telepath.com wrote:
FOR ALL TO SEE It's a spray which renders sealed envelopes transparent, making the letters inside as easy to read as postcards. "It leaves an odour for 10 to 15 minutes," says the spray's inventor, but, apart from that, "no evidence at all" that it's been used. While the manufacturer describes "See-Through" as a "non-conductive, non-toxic, environmentally safe liquid", human rights activists believe "it's an ethically questionable product" which could tempt security forces to bend laws. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns226930
April 1st is many months off, so why this? Tools for making envelopes transparent have been in use for many decades, perhaps a century or more. Bamford and Kahn, IIRC, discuss varius government agencies during WWII and later steaming envelopes--the so-called "Flaps and Seals" folks. They may have alluded to freon sprays and all the newer methods, but it was pretty clear that Flaps and Seals was not limited to just "steaming." I saw sprays used for making envelopes transparent sold in novelty stores and catalogs back in the 70s. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: 1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns