Gmail Messages Can Now Self-Destruct 204
New submitter Amarjeet Singh writes: Dmail is a Chrome extension developed by the people behind Delicious, the social bookmarking app/extension. This extension allows you to set a self-destruct timer on your emails. You can use Dmail to send emails from Gmail as usual, but you will now have a button which can set an self destruct timer of an hour, a day or a week. Dmail claims it will also unlock a feature that won't allow forwarding, meaning only the person you sent your message to will be able to see it.
Won't allow forwarding? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Really. Is there some hidden API into gmail? And receiver can do whatever it wants with the email, includ8ng forward, via cut and paste if necessary, assuming bizarre behavior from gmail.
And what of gmail's safety backups? How long before gmail clobbers those?
Re:Won't allow forwarding? (Score:5, Informative)
The only part of this that is related to gmail is that it is a chrome extension that adds the feature to the gmail interface. It sends the user an email link to view the message on a webpage, and then deletes the message later. It probably captures select and right click events in order to be "secure" too. In short, it is garbage.
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So basically this is like those silly e-cards my mom insists on sending for birthdays and holidays. It's got nothing to do with email, except that the link is sent inside an email message.
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The only part of this that is related to gmail is that it is a chrome extension that adds the feature to the gmail interface. It sends the user an email link to view the message on a webpage, and then deletes the message later. It probably captures select and right click events in order to be "secure" too. In short, it is garbage.
So, it's not email then. "Go to this website, we have a message for you." No.
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And nobody has figured out how to use Snipping Tool or Screen Capture or any of a number of ways to defeat said restrictions.
If the text is sent, it can be captured. False security is worse than no security.
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No.... it's a 3rd party messaging service using HTML E-mail and a custom browser extension. To enforce the "self-destruct" rule, the e-mail is hosted on the Dmail provider's mail servers instead of the content being sent in the e-mail message.
Nothing to see here..... I'm not going to be accepting any e-mail sent using such a service. I will tell the sender "No, send me a normal e-mail message; I can't read that one."
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Ah, too bad. I sent you my bank account #, SSN, mother's maiden name, the street I grew up on, and my favorite 4 digit number, and can't be arsed to type all that out again.
Re: Won't allow forwarding? (Score:4, Informative)
Can my computer prevent my smartphone from taking a picture of the monitor?
Trying to prevent screenshots on email is as stupid as those lockdown browsers that some schools make you use when taking a test. Everyone has multiple internet connected and camera equipped deviced now.
Re: Won't allow forwarding? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can my computer prevent my smartphone from taking a picture of the monitor?
It seems strange, but even right now, some software will prevent you from modifying photos of certain things (Photoshop and hundred dollar bills for example).
Computer companies are depending more and more on media companies every day.....consuming media is the primary use of many of these devices. Soon they might say, "Why not implement this? It'll make the media companies happy, and most people won't care."
Re: Won't allow forwarding? (Score:4, Informative)
Nah, you can get around it. Just do it in sections. Assemble resultant TIFF (or whatever) in IRFAN-View, or some of the numerous open-source image-editing programs.
The trick to "out-witting" the US Mint's genius bill-recognition scheme is to move some of the circles around –the yellow ones. They are 5-circle constellations, which is how Photoshop recognizes them as US currency. This has been known since the 'new' $20's came out about 15 years ago.
Re: Won't allow forwarding? (Score:5, Informative)
The trick to "out-witting" the US Mint's genius bill-recognition scheme is to move some of the circles around –the yellow ones. They are 5-circle constellations, which is how Photoshop recognizes them as US currency. This has been known since the 'new' $20's came out about 15 years ago.
The US didn't invent everything ;-)
It's been known about since 2002, when it was found in European banknotes dating back to 1996. It's thought to be a Japanese invention.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25... [cam.ac.uk]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Won't allow forwarding? (Score:4, Informative)
It's thought to be a Japanese invention.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25 [cam.ac.uk]...
Nice info.
Being a scientist, the first day the new $20's came out, I withdrew $300 and examined the bills under a microscope. The pattern quickly became obvious.
As did two other features. One is public. The other — while chatting with the head of R&D at the US Mint during a conference, I brought it up. He would only deny it, but a fresh sample of 15 is statistically significant. I checked again recently and they've quit using it, as it wears off.
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[...] two other features. One is public. The other — while chatting with the head of R&D at the US Mint during a conference, I brought it up. He would only deny it, but a fresh sample of 15 is statistically significant. I checked again recently and they've quit using it, as it wears off.
Cocaine?
No, he said they quit using it.
Cocaine [wikipedia.org] is one hell of a feature.
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Computer companies are depending more and more on media companies every day.
Which is why we need to continue support for independent and start up developers.
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It seems strange, but even right now, some software will prevent you from modifying photos of certain things (Photoshop and hundred dollar bills for example).
That's kinda lame . What about photos of Catherine Zeta Jones ?
_______
I use gimp
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"Circumvent" is really an inappropriate word here. By default, all image processing software will "fail to fail" unless the programmer goes to extra trouble to add the defect. I wouldn't even know that I "should"(?) make my projects not work correctly if I hadn't stumbled onto this thread. And I wouldn't know off the top of my head how I would make it fail, tho
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If you've bought a computer recently, it probably already has the UEFI drm in it. So we are getting closer, step by step, to that sort of reality. Whether we take the next step is unknown, but until now we haven't stopped moving in that direction.
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It seems strange, but even right now, some software will prevent you from modifying photos of certain things (Photoshop and hundred dollar bills for example).
Strange. why would it prevent me MODIFYING the $100 image - making it even clearer that my printout is NOT real money?
Well, another reason for using gimp then.
I imagine it's so that you can't alter the serial numbers; which you would want to do so that your counterfeit money will not be traceable to the person who had the real C-notes you copied. (Seems overly paranoid to me, since people pass real bills of this size all the time. Anyone else have a better theory?)
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What happens for people that never log in to Gmail through a browser but only download their email? Are they supposed to be prevented from downloading the DRMed messages? They must be if this 'security' method is going to do what it claims because otherwise anyone can download the message and then use an alternate mail client to do as they wish.
Also how is this DRM supposed to work? I doubt Google is getting involved since there's been no huge demand for such a feature so the company has to be taking advant
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If the end content needs to be presented to a human at any point, it can be copied. It is just a case of time, effort and quality. No matter how much they lock down the operating system, we can take a photo of the monitor. MS knows this, I don't expect them to push that hard for it.
Until they start connecting directly into our brains (with channel only being unencrypted "in-brain"), DRM is nothing but an inconvenience.
It's a Limited Threat Model Definition, not DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2000, a company called Disappearing Inc. made a presentation to the Bay Area Cypherpunks meeting about their product, which was pretty similar except that back then most people used real email clients instead of webmail. When the guy walked in, and we were expecting him to be pushing some kind of snake oil, he started out by saying that their threat model was to let cooperating people have some guarantee that their email would go away when they wanted it to, not to keep uncooperative people from doing that because you just can't stop screenshots / cameras / sender saving a copy / etc. and anybody trying to sell you that is selling snake oil. And suddenly he had a friendly audience, instead of one that was going to beat him up, because he'd defined a problem that could be believably solved, which was cool.
So the trick is that the file's in an encrypted format, and Disappearing Inc's server keeps the keys and a delete date for them, and if the sender and recipient are both using their product, the reader program/plugin/etc. fetches the key from DI's server; if not, you drop the file into an SSL-encrypted web form on DI which decrypts it for you. When the delete date hits (or earlier, if the file's set for read-only-once), DI deletes their copy of the key, so the recipient's mail box now has an encrypted binary blob file with no decryption key. Yes, if the server gets compromised, it's all toast. Yes, if the recipient's email client or browser is compromised at the time they read it, it's all toast. But if nobody's trying to subpoena or crack the message until after the key's deleted, then it's too late to recover old messages, though you can always try to attack new ones.
It was a nice system, and they stayed in business a couple of years before getting bought by somebody who got bought by somebody and disappearing into dead-dot-com-space. Similar systems have been sold by various other companies, often under category names like "Data Loss Protection".
If you wanted to do a "no forwarding" version, you'd do it by setting rules on who could access it, whether by IP address or some ID in the reader plugin or delete-after-one-read or whatever.
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The problem with no-forwarding is that people who want to forward the message anyway, by definition turn into non-cooperating people. You might as well just add a text "please don't forward".
Non-cooperative people are only one category of people who'd forward mails even though told they should not. Another large category are users that are just ignorant, as in what does forward mean?, and what's the difference between this reply button and that "reply" button?. For those, a cooperative "Disappearing" system would indeed help (whereas a friendly plea to not forward would just be ignored as computer person's gobbledygook...)
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And the same thing applies to people who don't want the message to disappear. If the message is important enough to warrant a self-destruct timer, it inevitably turns all recipients into uncooperative people.
+1 Insightful
Why do I only get mod points on boring days?
Well, at least here's a +2 for the AC...
Agreed. (Score:2)
And there are a bunch of similar applications for which you might want to be able to verify that the mail's only going where it should, and that it won't stick around as a legal record longer than you want it to.
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Which will only be a problem for those of you who still insist on using Windows. The rest of us will go on about our business with no problems at all.
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Which will only be a problem for those of you who still insist on using Windows. The rest of us will go on about our business with no problems at all.
While you might be right, "the rest of us" is not a very large number...
Until Windows is less than about 95% of the desktop OS market, then "the rest of us" is pretty meaningless.
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The point of my comment was to suggest that things like that will drive more and more people away from Windows so that eventually, only those users who can't or won't think for themselves will be left with it.
I get that, and it is a reasonable point to make. However that assumes that the majority care.
I don't think they do.
The number of people using iPads and iPhones would indicate such, and while Android has a large market share, a lot of that is on locked down phones such as the Galaxy S series that you can't do much with without hacking anyway.
How many people who own Android phones actually do anything more than basic stuff with them? I'd be shocked if the number was above 10%.
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It also assumes, I'll admit, that the majority are aware that there's a choice, and that the other choices work as well as, or better than what they're used to. As long as people make fun of "The Year of the Linux Desktop," people are going to be afraid to try it because they think it's hard to learn. I have a friend who's a computer columnist among other things, and he still thinks that you need access to a Unix guru to run Linux because that was true twent
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If only people had easy access to some sort of device that didn't rely on the Operating System in order to capture visual data. Like some sort of tiny camera that they always kept with them. Maybe it could be built-in to some other object that they already keep on them out of habit. We're probably decades away from anything like that, but who knows what the mysterious future holds!
Re:Won't allow forwarding? (Score:4, Interesting)
If I receive a 'click on this to see your message', like many, I will probably email back whoever sent it, ask them to resend as a conventional email (that is, disable Dmail) or else I will simply delete it. Quite possibly I might consider writing an app which goes through my gmail via IMAP and automates this process (that is, scan inbox, detect dmail messages, auto-reply requesting conventional email, and move to dmail-spam).
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I can't imagine this will ever get used enough for it to make any sense for you to spend your time automating the task...
Many special-mail things use this approach (Score:2)
This approach to special-handling-required email is pretty common - if the recipient has the right software (client / app / browser extension / whatever), their email client can read it directly, otherwise they have to use a web link to the provider's server. The more secure and scalable versions store only keys of some kind on the server, and include the encoded or encrypted message in the email, the simpler but less scalable and less secure ones keep it on the server and just include a link in the email.
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The filter would send the automated request of a clean version of the email.
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I can only imagine they render the text to an image hosted on dmail's servers, which is deleted after a set time.
But that won't work with Gmail, since Gmail caches all images on their own servers (including HTTPS and never-ending images).
Decryption Key stored elsewhere, not content. (Score:2)
Yes, you could implement it by storing the message contents on a server, but the non-LOL version that Disappearing Inc implemented back in ~2000 sent the encrypted message to the recipient, and only kept the key on the server. If you had a client at the recipient's end, it would fetch the key, otherwise you'd paste it into an SSL form on a web browser that would decrypt it. DI would delete the key after whatever business rules you liked (typically N days, or read-N-times, or "recipient clicks Delete", or
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Can't look at it:
http://www.hostinger.in/cpu_ex... [hostinger.in]
hostinger.in says that the cpu limit has been exceeded.
Remind me never to host anything there since it apparently becomes unreadable under a slight load.
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cool newssite you linked. "cpulimit exceeded" Muhahahahahaha
Um... (Score:2)
Pure undulterated bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
BS.
"it will also unlock a feature that won’t allow forwarding, meaning only the person you sent your message to will be able to see it"
Then I'll copy and paste the text to another Windows and foward it.
What the article describes is not e-mail. It's an messaging app with a different protocol using e-mail only as a transport mechanism.
Re:Pure undulterated bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
DRM is built upon the lack of understanding that playing content (text, image/sound/video) requires, BY NECESSITY, the ability to duplicate that content. It's always possible to do an analog scrape, if the DRM keeps everything in digital land "safe." As I recently found out with .m4b files, it's just a matter of how annoying the DRM producer wants to try and make that process, and how valuable your time is.
I never understood the desire to try and accomplish anything else. Software/hardware/device manufacturers that try and DRM-proof their products annoy me. I left a startup because of DRM:
"Brian, we need to protect our content. That's why I'm putting you on this DRM-WordPress-enabled-web-protect-our-desktop-application project."
"Actually, hardly anyone wants to buy this software yet. The best thing that could happen would be it would catch on fire on pirate networks. That's called free marketing."
"I spent twenty years of my life developing this software."
"And it's only been the last six months that you've sold ANYTHING. Let's close these sales deals, and then start developing the subscription-only services, that require a valid subscription, and then we can 'protect' the content by having AWESOME subscription based content. If anyone pirates v 1.0, let's make v 2.0 so much better they cannot wait to buy it, and support us!"
"The software isn't ready, we need to protect it."
"DRM in the absolute best case adds NOTHING to the user, and in the worst case is horribly annoying. I'm not going to work on DRM technology that will alienate our miniscule user base."
"I disagree."
"I'm out."
And this is why the second start-up venture I was a part of failed. Everyone left, after 20k in 'sales' never materialized based on the founder wanting to 'protect' his software. I am ready for the third failure though!
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playing content (text, image/sound/video) requires, BY NECESSITY, the ability to duplicate that content.
Ridiculous. If that were true, why would all those clever companies spend countless millions on advanced technologies like BD+ and HDCP?
You think they just enjoy flushing money down the toilet?
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They don't even protect the digital path very well, because the consumer needs the keys to view the content.
The idea is fundamentally broken. (As are the above-mentioned DRM schemes.)
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No, it was just missing the sarcasm tags. Sorry, I misjudged the tone/audience. But still preaching to the choir here :)
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How is this ridiculous? I don't understand. Are you being sarcastic with me? I'm sorry if I'm being dense.
Yes, I do think they are flushing money down the toilet. I have been a contractor long enough to determine when a customer wants to build something useful, versus has a political/emotional need to flush money down the toilet. I think there are lots of political needs to flush money down the toilet on DRM, and then clear hackers play the game of cracking their DRM (mostly for fun, since someone with DRM-
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playing content (text, image/sound/video) requires, BY NECESSITY, the ability to duplicate that content.
Ridiculous. If that were true, why would all those clever companies spend countless millions on advanced technologies like BD+ and HDCP?
You think they just enjoy flushing money down the toilet?
Q1: Is that a trick question?
Q2: Is there any movie released on Bluray that isn't available on Torrents in high-def?
Q3: Does the torrent download include unskippable adverts for anti-piracy that just get in the way of viewing content and softbrick your bluray player because the keys were revoked requiring you to download an update for 10 minutes when all you want to do is watch a movie?
Q4: If you answered no to question one, were you serious and are you should it wasn't a trick question?
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Rhetorical question. Feel free to take it seriously (who does gain what from DRM?), but thats getting off-topic.
Just saying that a self-destructing email is like uncopyable media. Neither works as claimed, but that doesn't stop it making a lot of money for the people selling it.
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"Actually, hardly anyone wants to buy this software yet. The best thing that could happen would be it would catch on fire on pirate networks. That's called free marketing."
The most enjoyable thing about watching Dragon's Den/Shark Tank is how these startups come through the door thinking their great idea is about to take the world by storm. Invariably the first question asked by the Dragons/Sharks is, "how many have you sold"? And the last question is usually, "would you prefer 50% of something, or 100% of nothing"?
Most people leave empty handed never to be heard of again.
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I gotta watch this show! I've seen it a few times, and it ALWAYS seemed really interesting (and I learned a few things!), but I never made watching it a habit. Thanks for mentioning this.
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Then I'll copy and paste the text to another Windows and foward it.
I would assume the copy and paste functions would be disabled, otherwise this would be pointless.
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How will gmail prevent the recipient from snapping a picture with their smartphone or just using the OS screen capture keyboard shortcut? This looks like a "Mission Impossible" gimmick or Snapchat wannabe feature.
OTOH, will this affect the market valuation of Snapchat since it's a very similar feature?
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Or you could simply not run the software at all and only lose messages even the sender's drunk ass knew they would be ashamed of in the morning. And possibly the occasional extortion scheme.
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If they're selling it as "secure" (as in a user *can't possibly* forward the data), then it's bullshit. If they're selling it as "this prevents someone from inadvertently forwarding your message to others or keeping it available longer than intended", then it should work as advertised. Obviously, it doesn't prevent intentional abuse.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of people simply use programs with the defaults enabled. Google's g-mail, by default, keeps ALL messages (by encouraging you to "archive"
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The only possible way it could work is by putting the text of the email into an inline image, or making the recipient click a link to view a web page with the text. Then they can "delete" it by removing the image/web page from their server.
Both of these methods won't work very well in practice. Emails that are mostly one large image tend to be marked as spam. and most clients (including gmail) don't display images by default. When gmail does display an image, it caches it on Google's servers so that the ser
Print Screen (Score:2)
Disappear without warning? (Score:2)
I already have this feature, it's called "Comcast"
El Psy Congroo (Score:4, Funny)
Won't/can't work (Score:4, Insightful)
Their extension can't affect the recipient's end of things if the recipient isn't also running that extension. In that case nothing Dmail can do can prevent the recipient from saving the message, forwarding it or doing anything else with it. Dmail can play tricks with HTML e-mail by replacing the body of the e-mail with a dummy wrapper that fetches the message via HTTP from a Dmail server and they can use some Javascript tricks to try and block "Save as", but those are going to run into problems with anything that blocks remote content or disables Javascript in e-mail. Even if the recipient's using Gmail in Chrome that's going to be an issue considering how that sort of blocking's basic to blocking malware. And of course if the recipient's running a non-browser client using IMAP4, Dmail's completely out of luck.
As far as being able to restrict viewing to only the recipient, that's easy. Every standard mail client today supports it. The hard bit's getting the recipient to generate a public-key certificate and install it as a personal certificate and key in their e-mail client. Then you just encrypt the e-mail using their public key and send it as an S/MIME message, their mail client will automatically decrypt it for them. I could even make that work in web-mail with a browser extension that recognizes the message text block, grabs it and decrypts it and stuffs the results back in the text block for the user to see. The obvious advantages here are that a) you wouldn't need to use any particular service provider to send the mail and b) not even the service provider or e-mail servers would be able to see the cleartext. The hard part's the PKI, and really all that needs is an extension for the mail client to automate generation of a certificate and installation into the client like we have in browsers. Depending on the browser and OS that might be simplified by taking advantage of shared OS cryptography features.
I've kicked this idea around as a commercial possibility, but it all comes down to two basic problems:
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Gmail Messages Can Now Self-Destruct (Score:2)
Nothing to see here. Move along. Don't feed the samzentroll.
Corporate applications? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Will this work for people sending messages to other random people? Probably not. But imagine a corporation deploying this system to all of their computers. Suddenly, the boss can tell their employees to do unethical things, make illegal threats, and so on without any chance that the FBI is suddenly going to show up and arrest him with evidence of his misdeeds.
It only takes one employee with a smartphone camera to completely destroy this model.
It's just a bit.ly for emails (Score:2)
I found this from the reviews on the chrome extension site as I didn't bother installing it, WHICH IS STILL MORE THAN THE ARTICLE AUTHOR MANAGED TO DO.
Self destruct my ass (Score:2)
If the email is here, it is here, and nobody is going to delete it.
Oh, it's actually HTML you say? Great, I didn't want to read that crap in the first place.
That is of course complete BS (Score:2)
You can keep them by screenshot. You can forward them by screenshot. The security value of this feature is zero. At best it represents a mild annoyance to the receiver that wants to keep or forward them. Snake-oil "security" at its best.
It uses the new BULLSHIT protocol (Score:2)
And works best on smart watches made from Unobtainium (the bullshit element).
I could be wrong though, and I invite the creators to email me proof to my mail server, where I'll view their proof via IMAP on Icedove. I'll even ensure I view it in the Rich Text subset of HTML and forward copies in mixed format to other interest testers.
In other news Ted Turner spent his whole day smoking joints instead of just one before breakfast. Jane must of locked him out of the bedroom again.
Good luck. (Score:2)
Once that email is in the wind... its free... you're not calling anything back unless you control the receiver's email server.
funny... (Score:2)
Finally (Score:2)
a good use for the HCF instruction
that's not how it works ... (Score:2)
... that's not how any of this works!
Not a total bust (Score:2)
This is a valid concept so long as both parties agree to uphold the privacy. However, that's a big "if."
Re:Unenforceable (Score:5, Informative)
It's only enforceable because it isn't email.
All this stupid thing is, is a system where the recipient gets a link to click on, which lets them go view the "email" (message) on some server somewhere, subject to a bunch of restrictions. I think there's also a browser plugin that basically does the same thing, but making it appear more like you're reading an email instead of just being redirected to some server.
This isn't email in the traditional SMTP sense.
Of course, it still is impossible for them to prevent you copying it somehow, even if you have to resort to screen capture.
Security for lazy people (Score:2)
If it's long you'll need screencasting software. Or are they using some DRM-like technology that'll prevent folks from even photographing the screen. Not much security by obscurity as security by inconvenience.
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The best part is, when you want to send a message to someone that cannot be forwarded and self-destructs, you first have to send it to this Dmail company's server in the cloud where it will exist forever.
And since most of the people using this "non-forwarding self-destructing message system" will be people sending threats and harassment to ex-girlfriends, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this entire thing is one big honey trap.
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I have seen systems that prevent screen capture as well.
We have some standards documents which must be purchased. In order to prevent copyright theft, the distributor of the PDF files requires software on your computer which will actively disable the native clipboard and screenshot capabilities while the PDF is open. In addition, the software will look for common screenshot software like snagit and greenshot and force them to close before you can launch the PDF.
Despite all of that, a user could still abuse
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perhaps you could also lock down the picture capability too by interfering with interlacing and/or refresh rates somehow.
Interlacing? Refresh rates? This is 2015, those things don't apply any more: everyone has LCD now. Software has no real control over the display.
We have some standards documents which must be purchased. In order to prevent copyright theft, the distributor of the PDF files requires software on your computer which will actively disable the native clipboard and screenshot capabilities whi
Re:Not if you email me (Score:5, Informative)
It has nothing to do with Gmail really, it's just a link to let someone view a message on some website. It isn't actually email.
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The second like in the article is spam.
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Not for me then. I'll be damned if I'll click on an executable, a script, follow a link somewhere else, when it's in an email. I learned long ago, you just don't do that.
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I don't remote load anything in email. Spyware and other malware is all too common.
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The "view your message here" link hypothesis seem more realistic (and sillier but meh).
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In essence, the email can "self-destruct" if the receiver allows it. I think there might be a slight security problem here, such as the "designers" of this thing not having even a basic understanding of IT security.
Yes, by Disappearing Inc. (Score:2)
Yeah, it was a cute name. The folks running it had a clue, knew what they could and couldn't realistically do.
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This. Links in email are dead to me. I don't follow them, my mail client doesn't follow them, it's just so many wasted bytes. And that includes e-cards from friends/relatives. You want to send me something, send it to me, don't ask a third-party to.
(Sure, I make an exception for links I'm expecting (have asked for) but even then I'll copy them to my browser. HTML in my email is turned off.)
I have the exact opposite view (Score:2)
Certainly in work situations a part of me dies whenever I'm sent emails with documents attached - doubly so when it's an Excel 'form' to be completed and sent back (presumably to some poor soul who ends up copy/pasting multiple replies into a 'master').
Consider this exchange between the canonical pair, Alice and Bob:
Alice works for ACME
Bob works for BizCo
They work out a scheme to make trade between the two easier and more efficient.
Alice sends the details in a document attached to an e-mail to Bob.
To cover
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Even better: This thing has a digital hole. Incompetent security-wannabes come up with things like these time and again, but they never work because they cannot work.
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I disagree. It it quite clear that the decrypted email can easily be copied in digital and analog form. This thing is utterly worthless as a security feature.
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No, I disagree with it being "unclear why the decrypted version cannot be saved or otherwise copied in some manner". It is quite clear that it can.
Some reading comprehension required when trying to tell other people what they mean to say....