They never learn: "Omniva Policy Systems"

[Bill Stewart]

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:
>
>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'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...