Perry's Paint Fable comes to mind...

[Tim May]

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 at 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 at 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