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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."
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.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.
-- Bruce Schneier
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.
But I assume that employees will still be able to print emails
Why do you assume that? Why do you assume that the print function will be enabled for protected emails or other documents?
Now, I grant you that no technological scheme can completely prevent information from being leaked - it can't stop me taking it down with paper and pen, or photographing the screen, etc, but it can at least make it difficult to do. Also, while the photogrpah would be harder to refute, my hand-written scrawl copy of an email could easily be dismissed as a forgery...
I can see this being very useful for companies and even some individuals, but essentially, there is no technological way of protecting data from redistribution by its intended recipient. It's not going to be as easy as just hitting print, though.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban