They never learn: "Omniva Policy Systems"

[Tim May]

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