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E-Mail Controls in Office 2003
TiggsPanther writes "The BBC's Technology News reports than the next version of MS Office will include E-Mail controls which should limit way that e-mail messages can be forwarded.
Being tied into the Information Rights Management concept, it might be interesting to see how quickly this gets taken up."
the washington post (via msnbc) says dont bother with Office 2003 at all
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982713.asp?0dm=T15NT
fp?
We just received our Office 2003 discs yesterday. I installed Outlook 2003 because the vertical-side-panel-snap-together-do-hicky is pretty sweet. .NET Passport. .NET Passport is active.
If you use the e-mail DRM service(straight from the dialog box):
- You need a
- Your documents won't be sent to or stored by Microsoft.
- If Microsoft decides to end the trial, you can access the restricted documents and e-mail for at least three months, as long your
- Microsoft won't decrypt contect protected by the service unless a court order requires it.
I read something about being able to use DRM within an organization, but that it required running some sort of IRM server. Don't know anything else beyond that though.
The only reason they are doing this to stop the leakage of internal memo's about destroying linux etc. But I assume that employees will still be able to print emails, so its all kind of pointless imho.
Wang33
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Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
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Actually they thought of that. Cut/paste/print screen are disabled. Of course you can take a digital camera to it or write your own screen capture app but the intent is to prevent casual forwarding.
Does it still support copy/paste?
How about printscreen?
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Well, that might be prohibited under a strong DRM scheme. However, there's certainly nothing preventing me from whipping out my digital camera and taking pictures of the screen, then forwarding the images to whomever I please.
Better yet, it could be one of those cell phone cameras. Technology gives back what technology takes away.
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So when will they release details of the encryption scheme used so that non-Outlook mail clients can be used......? I'm not holding my breath.
Uh, no. Nothing is foolproof because fools are just too damned clever.
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will be interesting to see how this works with non-MS email clients, esp on non-MS O/S's
As the article stated, "Microsoft says a free viewing program will be available for those who receive a protected document but are not using Office 2003."
However, since this is squarely targeted at corporate enviornments, I don't forsee this becoming a large problem.
Sure, it's bad for the end user information wants to be free blah blah blah, but companies want more control over where their information is going, and MS is providing it in this product. Don't want the FY04 budget leaked? Put a do-not-forward flag on it... Sure, you'll be able to screen-cap things, but casual copying will be prevented.
(We all know that protection can be circumvented by anyone with enough will... This is simply raising the bar for how much desire is necessary.)
That being said, I won't use it, but I'm sure there are corporations out there that will.
Will it improve productivity in my office? Not my Office, but my real office?
Simple answer: No, it would reduce it.
Thanks for another useless product.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Great having beers with you last night.
I just got a memo that they'll be laying off 30 people in engineering, starting with Dan. The fucktards have disabled forwarding permissions for it, but drop by my desk on your way to lunch if you want to see.
Ron
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
casual forwarding is not a problem, its malicious forwarding it needs to hinder
my thoughts exactly; if it's REALLY important, someone will still do it, so this is a lot of effort for almost no gain. Except to piss off your paying customers, something that helps us free software folks .. maybe it's got a good side afterall?
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new, blue colour scheme.
:)
See.. they always said the BSOD was a feature !!
Paul.
Since at least version 4 (maybe version 3.0) of Lotus Notes, you could prevent copying, printing and forwarding of a message. Under the delivery options when you're composing a new message, there is an option "Prevent Copying".
With notes, you could still grab a screen shot by pressing "Print Scrn", since that's tied into the OS, not the app.
should limit way that e-mail messages can be forwarded.
But it won't stop Outlook to be vulnerable to any kind of attack, such as a worm which "forwards" itself to everybody in your address book ?
Platform lockin anyone?
Having said that, it is a good idea. But totally non-enforceable without community buyin, and when you have community buyin it is easily circumventible...
Ok, this thread is full of people assuming MS are dumb. Monopolists they may be but dumb they're not.
1. IRM allows you to block forwarding of a message.
2. IRM allows you to block printing of a message.
3. Cut and paste is disabled for protected messages.
4. You cannot get round it by using a non-MS mail client, the client will simply not be able to open the email at all.
5. Screenshots are feasible but how many large corporations filter images in email sent externally? I know we do!
This is not going to be as trivial to work round as many are suggesting.
>Microsoft says a free viewing program will be available for those who receive a protected document but are not using Office 2003.
Why would one need a special reader if email standards are adhered to? Presumably this is an attempt to hijack the email system by getting all Office users to send email in a format which is unreadable by non-Office users. The only way to read email from a windows user will be to get a copy of Office 2003.
Personally I will be replying to all such emails with a polite message that the message got garbled in transmision and could the sender please fix the problem in their system.
I just see the next wave of Worms setting lifetimes on all my email to 0 and blocking all incoming mail from people in my office. Genius.
You forget, it's the PHBs who are the paying customers, not the users. PHBs will love this kind of thing, even if the actual users hate it.
Of course, it will if MS makes wearing a DRM Helmet part of the EULA.
Look, can we put the DoJ onto this NOW, rather than after MS releases it? Clearly sending proprietary format email violates the MS anti-trust settlement, and if we get someone working on it now, we won't have to deal with this piece of shite.
There is nothing here--NOTHING--that can't be done with existing protocols. PGP anyone (or GPG if you prefer)? I seem to recall that it had a 'read-don't-save' flag that you could set.
Furthermore, this won't help anyways. Hasn't anyone heard of screencaptures?
This new "feature" has no purpose other than to lock people into MS Office even further. It's a political trojan horse.
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So, what about those who are disabled? Will screen-readers be able to read these documents? If not, will major corporations bother using this? If so, what's to stop the screen reader from placing the content on the clipboard or in some other usable place?
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I got around this a while ago by setting everything to "no hardware acceleration". Bingo! PrtScr captured to clipboard, email-a-mondo.
When I worked in corporateworld, casually forwarded emails made up about 50% of my total email workload - I must have wasted about an hour a day on that crap. Sure it's a problem!
Of course, it doesn't look like this new MS stuff is going to solve that problem, as most people aren't going to bother to specify the 'no forward' option. In fact, I think that there isn't really a technological solution - it's a cultural issue.
This isn't email, this is a server based document viewing system. Email is a system of forwarding text from one computer to another through at least one email server. It can have attachments, and even shiny graphics. But it is a message that has been sent.
It stores the material on the server, and truely just sends a notification to someone. The notification itself is email, but that's where email ends and DRM begins. Since the email is really just a link to a server where the document can be viewed, it can't be viewed by "untrusted" platforms.
This is why these emails are only accessible by people with certain operating systems that can be "trusted". Since they can never truely lock out any MS OS short of W2K or XP (arguable on those as well), they aren't going to have a client for anything else. Even with these you'll have to have the client DRM software. You know the software that intercepts calls for things like "print screen", the software that could only be written in Redmond?
This is one way for Microsoft to get the masses to install DRM enforcement software. You know that new job your looking at? The one that requires completing paperwork through a DRM compliant system?
There is a reason that this feature requires Server 2003 and so on, it is because it is an interlocking and interdependent license obtainment system. So the question becomes, since this isn't email, what do you call a centralized document viewing system?
Notes encryption had a key length of 64 bits, but 24 of those bits were escrowed with US government agencies. As you know, 40 bit keys are trivially easy to break. It was a big issue about 8 years ago. However, I doubt it was discussed in the mainstream press. As for your comment about security, there is no way to know since no one has audited the full source.
FTP does not always work...especially when the vendor e-mailing you the executable is mailing you something that is nto for the general public....it's only for folks having the issue. There are GOOD reasons for keeping things like this out of the hands of the clueless user reading the web page and good reasons for mailing executables. The virus proliferation by clueless users is why mailing executables got a bad name.
Gorkman