They never learn: "Omniva Policy Systems"
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: http://www.disappearing.com/ 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 happens that I have met the founder of this company at a couple of parties at my house, so I have no idea what got into him with this late-90s-founded company. Maybe he was just exploiting the suckers. Their system, which makes varius references to being "Outlook"-compatible, may deter the nitwits from easily saving and printing, but it is not the nitwits one wants to deal with. Even the corporate whistleblowers (played by Julia Roberts in that movie "Erin Brockovitch") can very easily learn enough to open their mail with another program, or grep the spool directly, or use the other tools. Again, photographing the screen works perfectly well. And reliance on "Outlook," if this is what their scheme relies on, seems horribly limiting. What of those using Entourage, or Mail, or any of the dozens of platforms and news readers in existence. The site mentions that they are now Blackberry-compliant. Well, does this mean employees of the companies using "Omniva Policy Manager" cannot read their mail on their Palms, or their laptops running other mail programs, and so on? Seems like a fatally-flawed basis for a company. --Tim May "As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself." -- David Friedman
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. The founder came and talked to Cypherpunks just after their PR launch (IIRC, Bill Scannell was involved in getting them into US today.) 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. They're more concerned with data retention problems, aka the "Ollie North Email Backups" problem or "Embarassing Bill Gates Memo" problem - making sure that when things are supposed to be deleted that they stay deleted, and that if you don't explicitly make sure you keep sensitive material that it'll disappear. ~~~~ 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. Maybe you found a resume that I didn't, but http://www.ubois.com/id24.htm mostly lists working with technology companies plus writing articles for various technical magazines and less-technical newspapers. There was some marketing in there, but I didn't see any "motivational" or "coaching" stuff except other people's material on a website he's got stuff on. Googling for "Ubois" picks up a lot of "Dubois" references, though :-) I may rant separately about Orlowski's hit piece on Robin Hanson...
seems horribly limiting. What of those using Entourage, or Mail, or any of the dozens of platforms and news readers in existence. The site mentions that they are now Blackberry-compliant. Well, does this mean employees of the companies using "Omniva Policy Manager" cannot read their mail on their Palms, or their laptops running other mail programs, and so on?
My experience with ordinary "Joe Six Suits" users is that they are progressively dumber and understand less and less tools they use to powerpoint on. The gap between reality and their understanding of "computers" is widening. Computers have finally adapted to idiots. At this point snake oils as the mentioned one is perfectly fundable and marketable. There is a significant user base that it will work for. Remember all discussions about single DES being good enough only for braindead ? Well, now they are past that. Layer 7 interface obstacles are now good enough. ===== end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
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).
This is again inconsistent with the picture of friendly little bears all cooperating.
Just for the record, the *only* time bears "cooperate" is when, say, the salmon are running, there's too much for any one bear to eat, every bear has his own turf on the side of the river, and the power hierarchy is *completely* sorted out. The rest of the time they fight each other and kill, and sometimes eat, each other's offspring. Heck, even when they're on the side of the river and bored, they kill each other's offspring just for sport.
We did the same thing with trade-route intersections, even when we were trading raw rocks for finished hand-axes millions of years ago. Sedentary food-gathering and year-long storage, and then agriculture, made those intersections into cities.
Food is an attractive nuisance. Even with carnivores (eagles do the same kinds of things on a running salmon stream) population concentrations create property, and then culture, for lack of better words.
Brains just make the same fight more complicated, is all...
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga
At 06:52 PM 08/05/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 01:00 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:
It's nice to see that they're still around, unlike so many dot.bombs.
Why is it "nice"?
They had what looked like a legitimate security / privacy product, and were upfront about the threat models being regulators and anti-trust cops.
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.
While it's hard to tell from the web site, it looks like they've still got the same basic technical model - instead of sending raw text, you're sending text encrypted using a key that you fetch from a key server, and when the recipient wants to view it, the recipient runs a viewer that fetches a decryption key. The policy enforcement runs on the key server, which deletes keys when the policy says the document should expire, and apparently places some controls on who it's willing to hand keys to. People save stuff all the time, and forget it, and backup systems often save it even if they didn't explicitly try to save it themselves. By shipping the sensitive messages as encrypted files, the Save functions are only saving the encrypted version, not the cleartext. On the other hand, I don't know how much their integration with Outlook breaks it.
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?).
You can set up your policy servers to set who's allowed to fetch keys. There's no indication on the web site about how much granularity this has, or how much protection or authentication they really do.
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.)
Policy servers are run by the company using the system, not by Omniva, so you're still dependent on their competence as well as their honesty, and if they want to ship a broken system, it's not hard to hide it (e.g. use a compromised random number generator for the keys.)
~~~~ 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."
I didn't see Ryze. Looks like some kind of job-hunting thing. Minciu Sodas does look like a weird site - I'm not sure how much it's just a self-hyping conference board and how many people agree with each other like bloggers, but I didn't see anything on there that was actual content by Jeff, but it was too cluttery to spend much time hunting through.
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).
Jack Rosenberg, actually. Car salesman, with no self-doubt at all. While I thought Andrew Orlowski's Register article was pretty shoddy reporting, the Extropians Secret Handshake bit was funny.
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Morlock Elloi -
R. A. Hettinga -
Tim May