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Document Retention And E-mail
innocent_white_lamb writes "An interesting column by Jim Carroll about email within companies, document retention, how hard it is to actually get rid of an email, and how all of this can come back to bite you later on. "
Of course, you could also just not do anything evil to begin with...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Hi, sorry to post this here, but I'm looking for work at the moment - hope you dont mind :)
: - unspeakable hygiene, ability to point out humorous flaws in others. e.g. 'Our boss is a complete dickhead - and did you see his toupe - jeez!'
:(
Personal Details
Name - The_Fire_Horse
Adress - Under the bridge next to the sewer outlet
Phone - 1800-TROLL
email - The_Fire_Horse@goatse.cx
Career Objective
I want to be a paid troll on various websites
Summary of Skills
Strong Internet skills:- I can use AOL and love MSN, I also troll at slashdot
Personal Qualities
I religeously have a bath at least once a month, and I get on well with cleaners (we talk often about the state of the toilets)
Special Areas of Achievement:- I once got a FIRST POST on Slashdot. Apart from that, lifes been pretty dull
Employment History:
1998-1995 Microsoft - Was soley resonsible for developing 'Clippy' in MS Office
2000-1998 'Between Jobs' - I was a drunken bum after realising what I had done
2001 -2000 Rehab
2002-2001 As a new man, I entered society, and on my psychologists advice I became a Troller on Slashdot
Education
I went ot shcool and gto top markes in eNgesh
Interests/Hobbies
Wanking, trolling, and also wanking while trolling. I always read Slashdot at work^H^H^H^Hhome
Referees
CowboyNeal
CmdrTaco
Bill Gates
Thanks very much for your time, and I hope you pay me shitloads of money to goof around
(Disclaimer: I'm cofounder and cto of HavenCo, an offshore colo and supporting services company on Sealand)
This is one of the main reasons people put email servers offshore now, even if they're operating onshore. This got started with HavenCo's gaming clients, but we now have general-purpose mail server customers who just want to company with their existing onshore document retention policies without the risk of someone subpoenaing their mail server and then trying to recover the disk.
One of the features I'm working on now is some basic intelligence to detect out-of-character behavior by a mail server client -- such as attempting to download all messages, which would indicate they've been subpoenaed. If that happens, then we would attempt to contact the customer and get positive confirmation that they are *not* being investigated before allowing the transaction to continue. It's a trade-off between allowing normal function and protecting against legal attacks.
Perhaps an extension of normal document retention policies for companies can be to keep them locally for 3-6 months, then move them to offshore "cold storage" where they will only be released when the offshore agent holding the files is certain a request is not due to legal duress. Trade a bit of latency for a lot of security, and otherwise the documents get destroyed anyway.
Some estimates suggest that once it is all added up, American's send some 1.5 billion messages a day.
1.4 Billion SirCam "I send you this file for advice". Probably.
Central servers, dumb clients. If you have to control things, that's the only way to do it.
Simply include some extremely useful or important information in every email you send, and voila, you will find that it disappears every time, resisting even the most sophisticated attempts at retrieval :)
NB. This method works best if this is also the only copy of said information.
Tom Newton
So what is the lesson here? If you are planning on committing fraud, illegally maintaining a monopoly, or postponing a defective product recall to maximize profit, you should first make sure you have a document 'retention' policy? And then everything will be OK? What is wrong with this picture?
What about a story on the benefits of keeping old emails? I'm tired of hearing about the costs.
Fucking lawyers. Oh, my mistake. It isn't the lawyers, it is the legislators. Fucking legislators. Oh, my mistake. It isn't the legislators, it's the voters. Fucking voters. There, that's better.
jkljkl
When there's a lot of email, and your in a REAL hurry...
One of my company's senior managers started keeping a copy of every e-mail he sent or received because he got burned in the usual "you said this..., no that is'nt what I said..." that goes on in any office. After 2 years he had 6Gb in his Outlook .pst file.
Is the only enterprise (and home use) e-mail client worth using if you handle that many e-mails.
And as to it comming back to bite you... Don't do anything bad.. Be open honest and totally transparent in all your business dealings.. then nothing can come back and bite you.
:-)
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I find it fascinating that people openly discuss ways of destroying evidence in case of possible legal action. Is this going to be a standard MBA course from now on: "How to cover your tracks" or "Case Studies: Failures in Shredding Policy from Watergate to Enron"?
It makes you wonder why nobody looks at it from the opposite side. If you don't do anything illegal then your e-mail archive could prove valuable for your own defense. Trading companies, for example, keep all records of customer interaction, including phone calls, for use in the event of a dispute. You can never claim that your broker did something without authorisation because they archive everything.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Back when I worked at a .com years ago it seemed the exchange server crashed so much we could'nt keep our email longer then a few weeks if we did'nt back it up!!
:)
Then the CEO told us to auto delete mail older then 90 days... well the exchange server crashes took care of that too
I'm having a hard time figuring out what his point is. He's saying "we need a policy for archiving e-mail" and then he talks about Enron, where any policy regarding e-mail would have resulted in evidence being destroyed. Is he saying we need to start pre-emptively destroying email in case there's something incriminating in it?
"Digging up the dirt" isn't a new problem. Back when everything was done on paper, you could make copies and stash them somewhere, so shredding the original was never enough to ensure the document didn't exist anymore.
And as for saying "e-mail will play a role in many other unfolding corporate stories", well, duh!
... how hard it was for Bill Gates to keep all of those "leaked e-mails" from the public.
It's also annoying because I get a lot of informational mail that I "need" to keep. So it's either print them out or lose them. Well it would be if it worked right.
for example, my boss, God love him, has no idea how email works from the server end. frankly, we would-be administrators don't have the best understanding of it either.
with this in mind, i think one of the most interesting things to see is how any document retention scheme would be implemented by many smallish and medium sized businesses. of course, i'm thinking that we may not have the appropriate skills or facilities to carry out a doc reten policy that the government might impose. the other possibility -- more likey in an Enron case, is that employees might purposefully botch such a policy.
Top level MS officials no longer communicate with email.
All communications happen in closed door sessions.
Verbal communications are also discouraged.
Most of these meetings are like a game of charades.
Jamie Zawinski has a rather unpleasant story about this on his site:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
A very good example of how essentially harmless email can be seriously misinterpreted.
just use a proprietary format (like Word's .doc) and store the emails on magnetic tape. 20 years later all is gone and what can be recoverd cannot be read. Some versions of what many people today think are html-documents also decay pretty fast, especially if they only display with a specific browser running on a specific OS. If this OS only runs on specific hardware, as soon as that hardware becomes unavailable the documents become unreadable.
On a related note, I find people that put things in email they would not put on ordinary paper quite unaware of reality. Don't they know there are devices called "printers", that can put emails on paper? Don't they know that email obviously is "written text"? Except for being far more convenient, I assume that an email is a written document, that will be stored by whoever I send it to.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, I noticed that people use email for almost everything internally. Most of the stuff that large companies are liable for get thrown about in email when there are many other, often better communication methods. Unfortunately, there are a lot of middle-aged administrative assistants and managers that seem to think everything goes in email.
The lesson? Don't use email to distribute that 10 MBib presentation. If you have a memo, then email everyone a link to it and set the web server to spit out a no-cache HTTP header with the page. If you have a file to share with some people, put it on a file server and give people the link via an email, but don't just attach the little bastard file, which probably isn't so little anyway.
Emails can be forged so easily, how is their authenticity established?
I guess any decent sysadmin in the world could show the court a whole bunch of threatening emails from the CEO of his company, what would a court do in such a case?
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Slashdot hosts must not believe in document retention, especially when it comes to past topics...
... this could be one use for USAs nuclear plans. Just EMP everyone to get rid of any potential damaging emails :)
Of course, I'm sure some will say this is beside the point. Nothing stops employees from printing/saving email, especially if they WANT to incriminate the company. I don't think email makes this more of an issue than non-email incrimination does, however... just don't talk dirt in your email, duh?
Remember... electronic transactions are always going to haunt you.
Don't say anything, anywhere, that you don't want repeated.
Don't do anything, anywhere, that you don't want to be held up for.
Be aware of your email.
Oh, and use a decent email client/server solution. Use IMAP so that you only have one mail store. Delete old files.
And beware... Big Brother IS already watching a LOT of people.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The email for my State government is covered under the freedom of information act.
What this means is that anyone can walk into any State agency and under this act require that the agency provide copies of it's email.
There is a charge to cover costs and a waiting period to allow the information to be gathered.
This can cause real problems for agencies that delete email without a policy covering the removal of this information. Basically, if the agency deletes email without such a policy they can be required to "recover" their email. If they don't have the expertise to do so they can be required to contract out to a company who does have the ability. This could cost them tens of thousands of dollars.
Better to have a policy and to stay within the guidelines!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
My company, BitDaemons Ltd, has just released the Technology Preview of a product which we believe solves many of the problems outlined in this article. It's based around ebXML and so eradicates spam and any non-business specific mail. We are developing the full product for release in Q3 2002. And its cross-platform, including Linux, aimed at the desktop. There are a huge amount of articles at the moment about problems with emails in business like this one - we think our product, Octimal, will solve them.
If you used to get things in snail mail in a plain brown wrapper, don't consider getting it via e-mail. It gets xeroxed and copies archived before it reaches your in-box. It's not a secret anymore for anyone who wants to know what you got last year. ;-)
The truth shall set you free!
As I was driving in to work, I heard a PSA from CPAs of America, or somesuch. Part of the announcement talked about deleting un-needed e-mail "to save on disk space."
Now there's a ready-made excuse for Enron...
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Sorry, so interested in the article, I forgot to post the url for the product:http://www.bitdaemons.com
Have you ever, um, looked at legal statues? Just law, mind you, not "case law", i.e. every case ever litigated.
I have, in support of a project I work on. Just one narrow area of law, in one U.S. state. I tried to limit it to just the statutes, but I also had to look at some regulations and "policy", i.e. how the agencies involved chose to interpret the law.
It's insane. Maybe, with an army of lawyers, you could sorta comply with everything. Except the parts that are contradictory, impossible, or just too vague.
I doubt if anyone avoids "illegal" activity even in their personal lives, and it is actually impossible for business or even government, any complex entity. The problem with email and other electronic retrieval is that the normal wiggle room of life shrinks and shrinks. Aha, they did something illegal! This is done to make Joe Blow think the accused has done something actually immoral, when it could just be some absurd technicality, or just the sheer weight of things to comply with.
By the way, big business, the bugaboo of /., doesn't really mind this situation much. Makes it so hard for some upstart competitor to emerge and compete.
I've read a few comments already implying this is all about companies covering their tracks after commiting fraud or other criminal acts. These comments rightly ask why should we be concerned about policies and technological solutions to aid this.
However destroying evidence is only a small part of what this debate is about - it just makes for the flashiest headlines.
The issue is about the way email is used - many people write emails with an informality similar to speech, forgetting that email often has a 'lifespan' equivalent to many physical documents. When you also consider that emails are being used as documentary evidence in legal cases this begins to be a cause for concern. Why? Because people don't always express themselves precisely and may give a misleading impression - especially if the email is taken in isolation.
And it's not just the informality it's the 'working document' status of email. Let's say a particular business decision is the subject of scrutiny in a legal case, and let's say it was a decision reached after some discussion. If that discussion took place in a meeting then the documentary evidence would be the minutes - which would express the decision reached. If that discussion took place over email - would you be able to discern later that an email saying "We should do X" was expressing the final decision or merely a point of view in an on-going discussion? What if you had to prove than Y not X was the final decision?
So the policies that need to be implemented are not necessarily about covering up wrong-doing, they are about making sure that documents (emails) which may be treated as written communcation, have the clarity and riguor that they need. If they are informal working documents then they may need to be either clearly marked or destroyed at an appropriate time.
In my view the heart of any sensible policy should be education about how to write emails appropriately. The guideline I always use is "am I still happy to send this knowing that my customer/competitor/a.n.other could potentially see it one day?" If the answer is no then the email either needs re-writing or possibly a different form of communication is needed.
Another aspect to this that seldom gets mentioned is the notion of one-sided archiving: Two people in negotiations have a dispute about how the e-mail-based conversations went, and only one can produce the prior e-mails (and often selectively at that, leaving out the ones that don't support his/her side of the argument).
About the only solution is to be as careful as you can about what you put into e-mail (in all iffy situations make explicit references to all pertinent correspondence and other docs), and make sure you can retrieve everything from your past e-mail when needed.
Firstly, users ability to deal with an increasing volume of business email varies enormously.
Some people are super efficient - their inbox is virtually always empty, anything they need to keep is moved more or less straight away to a permanent folder related to the subject, and anything they don't want to keep is deleted.
If I look over my shoulder at some of my more senior (chronologically speaking) colleagues, their inboxes are a mess. They can't recall email on a particular topic, they don't process incoming email into sensible subjects, they just let it pile up. Then I hear them complaining that they get too much email.
Secondly (and perhaps more ontopic) is the matter of physical document retention.
Many companies simply retain everything, and the cost of storing these documents mounts up and mounts up. People have the attitude that "we might need it some day". Yes, you might.
But you might not.
Cost of storage of every document ad infinitum = $x.
Cost of impact of not having a document at some arbitrary time in the future = $y.
If $y is less than $x then why are you keeping every document by default?
Or don't you know what x and y are?
I think.
Magically about two weeks before the go live day, key emails started 'disappearing' from mailboxes. They seemed to only be emails relating to the deadline and what had been passed on to management. Then two critical computers came up missing.
Being a government agency, everything is supposed to be recorded and kept public record. But it was fascinating to us to watch these just disappear. Luckily we had found a tool before hand that allowed us to connect to the Novell message store using Outlook (yech) and export all the emails of two key people as PST files, which were stored off site.
So while I am all for the tracking of emails, etc, etc, I am NOT all for behavior like that.
(Sorry for posting AC, but I still have my job there and would like to keep it that way)
I'm a little surprised the article didn't mention the greatest email bust of all. In 1987, the questionable para-military funding activities of USMC"Lt.Col.OliverNorth were uncovered partly by an investigation of messages that he thought he'd deleted from the White House's internal email system.
North hadn't counted on the "deleted" messages showing on backup tapes.
Partly because of this smoking-gun evidence, North was convicted in 1989 of aiding in the obstruction of Congress, accepting illegal gratuities, and destroying documents.
North's conviction was later overturned (with great irony considering his status as a law-and-order conservative icon) on a legal technicality.
bahh..it it would be better for large corporations to be ignorant of this. After all, large corporations are eeveel.
Our company is considering a mandatory policy that states that no email is to be kept beyond 90 days. This policy is based on the very premise in the article: it can come back and bite you later.
Can't say I agree with the policy entirely, but I'm just a worker bee.
On the specified page
Tech News Poll
Should websites stop running online polls
because they are unscientific?
[] Yes
[] No
[] Don't Care
No CowBoyNeal option, but funny question !
McCartney fans pay bus tickets. [...] Lennon fans too, with discretion.
all this discussion of the discoverability of email (and the article's seeming implication of email policy as ass-covering) misses a very important point i've always wondered about...
:) is less than that required to send a snailmail or memo. less of an inertial-laziness barrier, so more impulses to write make it to execution. applying the rules of written correspondance to email is reasonable, i guess, but it muddles the fact that they are different forms of communication. i would posit that email has more in common with postcards than letters.
:)
how does one determine the actual age or origin point of a given file? what is to prevent an unscrupulous individual from forging (or quickly deleting) email that would be used as discovered evidence?
why is it discoverable in the first place? this stuff is infinitely more forgable than paper documents.
---
and to answer the author (and others') comments about why email is treated so casually: the level of effort required to create an email (or usenet or webforum post such as this
(and by extension, an attachment is like a package. sizeable, expensive to deliver, and annoying if it's just a brick.
---
mike, passwordless
This might be a factor: the other day I got a call from a gal with Lotus/IBM asking if I think a per user/per month external email would be marketable. This is the second time I've heard of a company starting to offer such a product, the first being Cisco. Since then I've come across a few companies marketing to the same tune.
Along the same idea as Microsoft's software subscriptions, this could be the email model of the future. Now we throw in the factor that companies may not even be in control of where/how their documents are being destroyed? Assuming, of course, that it is possible to destroy all evidence of an email. (Due to the nature this could be quite difficult)
I know that even with on-site, 100% controlled email it has proven difficult to find a good way to enforce a document retention policy. Users (and I'm no different) have tendency to want to horde their past emails, text index them, and search them from time to time, as you never know just what pieces of the past, from two weeks to two years, might prove useful. You can restrict the size of a user's mail-file size, but this only restricts how much the save and not how far back they can save. As of right now, mail servers don't seem to take into account an enforced document retention policy. Will a "Delete Documents Older Than:" field appear as an option on newer versions of Exchange or Domino?
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A corporation is a legal construct designed to give a business the same rights as a person, right? If so, in the face of a subpoena duces tecum, why can't a corporation plead the fifth amendment? I assume there's a clear legal answer, but IANAL.
Hell, I can't keep the e-mail! I'm trying to retain documents! Repair teh database - there went attachements since June! Use the IS/DS Consistency aAdjuster - whoops - restore a backup - Oh, that one
s no good, go find one that works. ""Sorry everyone, the e-mail server's been rolled-back to last Wed night at 6:00 PM. Sorry for the trouble.""
I can't believe MS got in trouble for having e-mail retained too long, they must be using AS/400's or *nix + Domino for e-mail.
-Krus
The SEC (Securities and Exchange folks) have big rules on what sorts of things you have to retain, and for how long. All email and electronic documents are covered, including transcripts of electronic chat programs (which is why you have to use an approved chat program that allows chat logging).
The whole key to this is to not allow POP or IMAP mail access, and that makes it much easier to apply retention rules.
Aha. So if your client is being investigated and they tell you not to allow the "transaction" [transfer] to continue, you won't. In which case they'll face criminal charges for willful obstruction. Not much help to them and not really a valid option to the legal automatic deletion of emails.
The biggest question I have about this is how can they prove that the person whose name is on the From: actually sent the e-mail?
We all know just how insecure e-mail really is and how easy it is to forge an e-mail, so how can these e-mails stand up as evidence. I can see some justification in if the headers show the e-mail coming from that person's workstation's IP connecting to ${CORPORATE_MAIL_SERVER}, but even this is not 100% proof that it came from ${PERSON}.
All of a sudden, I feel the urge to become an investigator with expertise in email analysis.
I can see a feature in the next version of Exchange where the admin can select an email and have it deleted from all mailboxes that it resides in. With Single Instance Storage it's not that big of a deal. The problem comes when people archive email to personal folders. I can see "solutions" from Veritas and some other companies for smart email archival software.
All this destruction of e-mail for liability reasons thwarts mining e-mail for the purposes of knowledge management, such as can be done by products like Lotus Knowledge Discovery System. With today's high turnover rates, KM is needed to maintain long-term productivity, but evidently legal issues are dwarfing anything like actually earning money by being productive. (Hmm, has a ring of revenue generation by old large companies through patent portfolios rather than innovation, doesn't it?)
This post is completely miss-leading, even assuming 'HavenCo' have a legit claim to be off-shore.
Placing/using an email Server 'off-shore' offers not more protection than refusing to hand over the messages in the first place, you will be in contempt of court and go to jail until you agree to turn them over. FACT!
Causing the destruction of evidence is a crime, in most countries, even if it is carried out by an agent. So in most cases, all 'HavenCo' will achieve is to further incriminate.
BTW: How does a mindless commercial plug warrent +5 Interesting ?
I also have always kept replicated copies of all my work e-mail. Want to see my boss from 4 years ago telling me to forge timesheets to bill more hours to a certain customer? It's in there. Want to see a pornographic joke from half my coworkers? I've got them.
Cover your own ass. I assure you that your bosses are covering theirs.
I am the CEO of a UK-based company. I send documents to you, with the instructions "Give me access to these documents on demand, unless you think I'm being subpoenaed". Then, when the subpoena comes, I'm supposed to tell the court "I can't give you those documents; I'm paying HavenCo not to give them to me"?!
I effectively made a contract with you designed to obstruct justice. They'll just lock me up for contempt until you hand them over. In that case, are you still planning to keep them locked up forever while your customer rots in jail?
You must have gotten Prince Roy pretty wasted before he signed the contract to allow you to do business in Sealand. He must be regretting jumping on the Internet bandwagon about now. This behaviour will eventually prompt Britain or the EU to take action and dissolve Sealand, and you won't care because it's not your little-recognized sovereign nation you destroyed with your shady business practices.
As I recall the Clintons had huge amounts of eMail disappear. The Justice Department under Janet Reno, would not agree with this article. The stuff just plain disappeared.
As long as they are blond with big boobs.
Weren't they pushing for self destructing single-use CDs?
"Things will be misconstrued" is a cop-out. How do you misconstrue a direct warning that the recipient is too pre-occupied to do anything about? If there is an explanation, give it. I don't think juries are that stupid. If they are, then we're in alot more trouble and need to work more at educating them, or at least not putting them to sleep in court.
Sure, anything can be taken the wrong way. But the solution isn't to give nothing, but rather to assist people in seeing the right way. Unless there isn't one! In which case, you're guilty, and I don't see why anyone should help you hide your guilt.
Wow, it only took 4 minutes for the "Anal Retention" post...
The real problem is my 1/4" tapes written with proprietry OS/2 backup software.
Moral: Open sauce is better than tomato sauce - except on burgers
Back in the days when I first began using email on UNIX, I realized that
1) far too many people had root access to the email servers;
2) far too many people could put sniffers/tcpdump on the ethernet; and
3) far too much mail transited through university campuses (Rutgers Univ comes to mind)
We came to realize, and to advise our management, that email was public speech.
Anything you said was subject to being overheard and repeated. That applies to recipients who forward mail, too.
The same eventually was realized about voice mail.
Encryption (usually) doesn't control recipients storing and forwarding your messages.
I have been running an Exchange 2K server in a small enterprise enviorment for about 4 months now. We origionally migrated from Lotus Notes, and I am currently much happier with Exchange 2K than Lotus Domino. The server has been running for that entire time without requiring a single reboot.
We perform backups of the entire server on a 20gb Travan drive daily. Every monday I run exmerge and extract every mailbox into its own PST file. I can then usually compress the PSTs down from 900mb to less than 400mb, at which point I burn it to CD and file it on a shelf.
Sorry for the Anonymous..
.pst file in the case of Outlook) would be a better choice.
Saving email is a double edged sword. It could save your can one day and get you fired the next.
I work in a large DC law firm. We are occasionally tasked to scan a clients supplied HD, zip disks, and other various media to pull and collect email files to be sent off and printed to be presented in court. I've seen some jobs produce over 100 full CASES of printed output from just one person. I have no idea who or how someone has the ability to go through all that crap. It seems to me that submitting the information electronically (like a
at my work, a major corporation, it is nearly impossible to KEEP a bloody email for more than 90 days. We use exchange (yes I know) and the system will purge anything in a .pst folder format older than 90 days. It patrols your offline archives, it will even find a .pst or archive folder that has its' filetype changed. The only successful way I have found it to back it up on physical media and restore to an offline computer. If you put it back on a connected computer the damn thing will find it and purge it overnight. Only certain users with legal requirements are able to exceed this bloody purge.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If your law firm received all your email communication and you had to call your lawyer on the phone and ask to have your email read to you would it be protected by lawyer client privilege?
If you have your law firm host your email could the imap connection be considered communication between you and your law firm and therefor protected?
It seems to me if lawyer client privilege is broad enough to cover chemical and biological research it could also be used for something like email.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
As someone who has done more than my share of e-mail server disaster recovery work, I actually *admire* anyone who can extract specific messages from random backup tapes.
Most of the calls I got involved blood on the floor, unmarked backup tapes (in several different formats) and hours (and hours and hours) of inventory, catalog, restore to get a server back in production.
Also, very few companies are keeping more than two weeks of e-mail backups. Have you done the math recently? My old dot-bomb employer (may the accountant have nettles in his testicles), had 100 Gig of messages for 800-900 staff on 5-6 servers scattered around the US. Our original legal guy wanted us to keep mail for six years. After I did the math, the cost ($$ and manpower) was prohibitive (plus we started imploding at that point - anyone interested in a seven year lease of prime Boston real estate?).
Another issue is how do you prove a message is real or forged? Digital sigs? Hard copy? It would require 'expert witness' testimony to verify the authenticity and lineage (source, route, etc) of the message.
Doesn't seem laughable to me, nor is the offer of assistance from one person or any small group or country.
SeaLand is trying to act legitmately, and their intent is honorable (if clouded with the obscure hope that the US and other nations will recognize them officially by taking up their extended offer).
Personally, I have little difficulty reading my 1/2" tapes from 1974. They are mostly card images, or tar format.
Very high quality tape? I have to admit I don't have personal experience with old tapes, but I heard in several places that the oxide layer is flaking off on some of them and the read signal gets very weak with time.
The copy-trough-effect also degrades ordinary tapes when they are unwound and rewound (as in "playing" them). I also have several 5-8 year old 3.5" floppies that have become unreadable because of weak read signal.
Anyway, I will accept that my time-frame is wrong if you say your old tapes are still good.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
This has nothing to do with the article, but the online poll at the bottom of the article is hilarious:
Should websites stop running online polls because they are unscientific? Options: Yes, No, Don't Care
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
> An interesting column by Jim Carroll
But its no "People Who Died".
...hence:
#include
In my small company, our need is not destroying email, but archiving it. Much of our email is with customers, and there's much value in preserving it as part of our corporate memory. For example, the sales team needs corporate memory because the saleperson dealing with a customer this year may not be the same salesperson dealing with the same customer next year. The previous email correspondence with that customer is very useful to a new salesperson. I'm sure there are other examples of the need for preserving email. How about engineering discussions about the design of a product that eventually changes the world. I'm sure that kind of information is gold to historians.
*he* is racist ??
HA - that's funny! At least he doesnt go around blowing up innocent people in the name of some loser like the titiban (or is that taliho, or tali - something)
It's one thing to troll on a website - its completely different when you losers bomb innocent people - THAT is the difference.
Losers
Just because there are more racist people in the world than this guy you presume that he is not racist? That's not logical.
>HA - that's funny! At least he doesnt go around
>blowing up innocent people in the name of some
>loser like the titiban (or is that taliho, or
>tali - something)
Are you talking about the Taliban? They don't murder innocent people in the name of the Taliban you twonk. They claim to do it for Allah, which is the arabic translation of the Hebrew word Eli - Elohim, which is who we westerners call God.
>It's one thing to troll on a website - its
>completely different when you losers bomb
>innocent people - THAT is the difference.
That's like a thief saying "I don't have to stop stealing $50 from the local newsagent when there are people stealing millions of dollars from corporations". That's just stupid. They both have to stop. Don't remove his responsibility because of another's actions. He should take responsibility for his own actions.
While he may not bomb innocent people America certainly has had it's fair share of racist killings, and that's the same feelings, the same hatred (in fact it is much less rational than the Taliban/Al-Qaeda's hatred of America).
And don't talk about them as if I am one. Do you have a talent for ignorance that you choose to put people into categories so you don't have to understand them? I don't bomb Americans, nor do I bomb Afghanistan people, nor do I prohibit people from necessary food/medical supplies resulting in needless death.
The world's not as simple as you think. Attitudes shape the world, even if you don't act on them.
I wonder if instant messaging is helping reduce the silly email messages sent around the office that could come back to bite someone.
Unless you remember to save the conversation, you'd have nothing and I doubt a saved copy without any timestamps is going to hold up in court.....I think I can make up a conversation as good as anyone else....
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Dean Kamen's island?