They never learn: "Omniva Policy Systems"
Tim May
timcmay at got.net
Tue Aug 5 11:30:41 PDT 2003
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
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