They never learn: "Omniva Policy Systems"

[Tim May]

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:
>>
>> 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.

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).