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This Text Message Will Self Destruct
mwilliamson writes "Silicon.com is reporting that Staellium UK (cell provider) has created a protocol in which text messages disappear after 40 seconds. This, of course, relies on the implementation of the protocol in the device used to display the message. They're touting a future roll out for photos as well, and service in the US."
For me, the first thing that comes to mind from "self destructing SMS" is the advertising potential. Combined with a locator, you could now receive "Eat at Wendy's!" messages that expire so you don't have to delete them.
I don't really see it happening, but advertising in the old markets (TV, radio, newsprint) is not returning as big of a response as it used to. They'll always try to find more direct ways to advertise, and I wouldn't be surprised if this move is a predecessor to more direct advertising schemes.
Hopefully I'll be able to opt-in rather than opt-out of any such programs.
FWIW, I just can't imagine that people are SMS'ing proprietary information. If its private and confidential, keep it on paper (preferably typed with a typewriter). Digital information will always be too insecure.
FTS: "has created a protocol in which text messages disappear after 40 seconds."
"Nothing to see here. Please move along."
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
other then pretending to play james bond
My ASCII Porn! 40 seconds isn't nearly enough!
They will call their new technology... Divx?
signatures are for fools with hands
For instant notifications powered by Upoc, I certainly wouldn't mind this. If I leave my phone off for a couple hours (no signal at work) I get an SMS flood soon after leaving and end up having to delete messages after I read them. While it's not big deal it would be nice if I didn't even have to think about it.
*NO* text message that *I* get is worth keeping around after I read it. If it was, I'd just e-mail it to myself or copy/paste it to another application.
I like the idea, YMMV.
As if the average person wasn't already running under the assumption that they were somehow anonmyous in their electronic communications. Frankly, I wouldn't knowingly buy a phone that implemented this protocol and didn't allow it to be toggled.
I thought the text message got routed to their servers, and the receiver got a message with a link to the wap site. they'd then get sent to the wap site to see the text message, and the wap site would redirect or do something after 40 seconds to remove it from the viewer's screen. Standard http redirect?
When I first glanced at this I though of exploding phones, perhaps a la Rammstein. Now you can send death threats and stalking messages without those pesky records to catch up and convict you!
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Text messaging reduced to the level of that arcade game where alligators poke up through holes, and you have to hit them on the head before they disappear. Maybe I can try this while driving, just to make it more interesting.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Sure you can do it in a totally captive corporate environment (sort of), but companies like "Disappearing Inc" tried to make it a product/service combo. As far as I can tell, it was an utter failure. Email -is- an archival medium. Which is why it shows up in the discovery phase of just about every business civil action these days. SMSes are generally not worth bothering with, in the "I'm waiting for you at the OTHER end of the pub"...
"No additional technology was required beyond [Microsoft] IIS," said a spokesman, "Once the message is read, the server crashes, and subsequent attempts to read the message fail. As they say, a crashed server is a secure server."
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I read the headline and thought that maybe text messaging as a medium would disapear and I would no longer recieve annoying messages. Shame on the poster for getting my hopes up only to dash them to the ground!
Just who owns a text message anyway? It's my contention that once it arrives on my telephone that it's mine. I predict this will not prove to be a popular feature.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Assuming your intended recipient doesn't have some covert means of recording the messages (in which case this is as much nonsense as it sounds), what's wrong with sending a flash SMS which many mobile phones won't store? Plus it usually appears more prominently than a regular one. If that won't work, what about a one-time automated voice recording? You can't make data self-destruct if the receiver doesn't want it to :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Richard Stallman correctly predicted this was going to happen as a result of of DRM, also known as Digital Restrictions Management, Treacherous Computing, or Handcuffware. To quote from his essay "Can you trust your computer?":
...There are plans to use the same facility for email and documents--resulting in email that disappears in two weeks, or documents that can only be read on the computers in one company.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. "Getting it in writing" doesn't protect you when the order is written in disappearing ink.
Imagine if you get an email from your boss stating a policy that is illegal or morally outrageous, such as to shred your company's audit documents, or to allow a dangerous threat to your country to move forward unchecked. Today you can send this to a reporter and expose the activity. With treacherous computing, the reporter won't be able to read the document; her computer will refuse to obey her. Treacherous computing becomes a paradise for corruption...
Please sign me up for your new service.
Love and kisses,
Paris Hilton.
I seem to have read quite a few cases of people soliciting minors via cell phones, sending messages and such. Can you say "self-destructing evidence"? Step 2: Require cell phone providers to log all SMS messages. Step 3: Give unlimited access to FBI to catch terrorists.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This kind of message already exists for GSM mobile phones. It's called WIG Push (SIM Browsing or SAT) messages. They are visible for a short time and vanish after a timeout.
For more information check http://www.smarttrust.com./
Regards!
The original article notes that, even though the recipient loses access to the message, it's still stored for law enforcement, the intelligence community, and probably for marketing purposes.
The transmission is still vulnerable. Until a truly secure solution for encryption is developed, sensitive information will still have the capability of interception. At least in the way of one-time passwords, we're still relatively safe from double-fronted SSL/TLS _and_ SMS attack/interception. The self-destructing password would be useful in this facet of password security.
Users of the world: We're here to help you, but help us help you. (your IT dept)
"Officer, someone sent me a text message saying they're going to kill me!"
"Can you show me?"
"Sure, here it... erm, well it was here a minute ago"
"Of course it was"
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
This seems to be an MMS going out to the handset with a link to a web/wap site embedded in the message. Clicking this link will setup a GPRS connection to the site, which will flash the message and delete it. This is stock 3GPP usage with no protocol updates necessary. Please note, however, that it is not a text message. The sender does not use SMPP to push out a SMS message (max 160 byte) through the SMSC. This will cost both the message sender and receiver a lot more traffic than a regular SMS. /M
Assuming they do include photos in a bit, just think of the various "send your husband a hot image" ads we'll see for it. Polaroid cameras tried to pitch themselves that way based on the supposed privacy of not needing to develop anything, at least back in the day, and I've seen at least one video-enabled phone commercial in which someone picked up someone else's call and gawked at the other guy's wife. Yeck.
As a service this would sell to a) bad managers and b) people who make videotapes of themselves... Wait a second, how do I invest again? That seems to be a fair-sized market.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
This particular attempt at secure messaging will be circumvented in 5...4....3...2...1...
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
I predict:
From my personal point of view this "auto descruction" feature should only be seen as a convenience where phones autodelete messages to keep enough free memory space.
Thsi whole thing sounds useless and annoying. There's nothing to stop a modded phone from recording the message, and the message is still unencrypted and vulnerable. Furthermore, maybe just add a password feature to the phone.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Just save/copy/print it before it goes away. Take a picture of the screen if you really need it for proof of something.
Sounds like a great idea. What happens if you can't finish reading it in ti..
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
Click the text message and win a free ipod (*you have 40 seconds to to this SPECTACULAR offer)
Am sure almost every article on Slashdot was "reported" elsewhere beforehand.
That is not the point. Some of us simply don't have the time to check a million other websites, instead we use Slashdot and a handful few others that can filter out stuff of interest.
Maybe if you subscribed to a couple of hundred tech-blogs, you might end up knowing half the headlines on Slashdot. But it's much easier to just read it on Slashdot, in one place, when I can be sure that it will eventually show up.
It was a couple of days late. So what? By the time the service would be available, it would be more than a few days later.
I do not understand this obsession with, "Oooh, I saw this on $foo 32 minutes and 23 seconds ago. Slashdot is SLOWWWWWWWWWWW."
Big deal. Some of us don't really care, as long as we hear about it somehow. Slashdot is primarily a forum, if you are a news junkie, look at other sources.
*shakes head*
Just as governement agencies can request your telephone records if you call someone with a death threat (now, in complete secrecy, whether or not you've violated the law), it's hard to imagine them not being able to acquire the same kind of information from the service responsible for routing them.
... because the system simply sends a WAP push to a page which expires after a given period of time - the request is made over plain HTTP. The problem is that WAP gateways often choose to ignore the "no-cache" directives as do a lot of WAP browsers, which means that the message remains in the cache and can still be read both by the client and the gateways along the route after it has expired. A quick test we ran showed the messages being stored on the memory of a phone even thought it wasn't supposed to be cached. Also, it is always possible to simply save the page source to a different file on the phone.
A mobile software consultancy I work for is actually working on a project for a client which takes things a step further by encrypting the traffic from the server to the client and allowing the user to read it only via a J2ME MIDlet which never stores the messages to the RMS (persistent storage). For more information check out www.simtext.com
Is this just the precursor to the next version of Sony DRM... ??
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just as governement agencies can request your telephone records if you call someone with a death threat (now, in complete secrecy, whether or not you've violated the law), it's hard to imagine them not being able to acquire the same kind of information from the service responsible for routing them.
So the protocol would force the message to be deleted off the headset but the network would retain a copy? Kinda defeats the purpose of the security doesn't it?
Do the cell networks even keep a copy of normal SMS traffic? Or do they just log the fact that an SMS message was sent for billing purposes (like normal phone records -- they don't log the call itself)? Do they even keep a record of who you send messages to or just a running count?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I invented a protocol that can make the sun shine out of your ass, but you need to use an instant messenger that supports it.
manufacturers announced today they will try and sell a security related service over a copmletely insecure and unreliable communication system
imagine that
But security agencies will require the company to archive all messages for five years ... or is it ten?
Tom
Whilst I don't doubt that this kind of functionality has the potential to be good and bad - anything which requires support from the majority of vendors before it can be used will fail unless there is a significantly compelling reason to have it (eg. T9).
I don't see this as being quite in the same league as T9 though.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
well, exactly that is the point. there's a little 007 in every real british man :-)
Where british men store their action figures is their own business...
Lotus Notes has something where you can't forward, reply, or print an e-mail. I just hit print screen and ran it around the office. The guy (who was supposedly a Lotus Notes expert) was very puzzled at how I got his e-mail printed. It will be very good for people who don't know what the PRINT SCREEN key is. Like those executives that are talked about in the article.
dealing with the ladies, that is.
this is perfect for juggling multiple girls at the same time. text message disappeare so your girlfriend/current fling cant to bust you...
no more of the "who is jennifer and why did she say you is she telling you she isnt wearing any panties...?" conversations.
maybe this didnt come up yet because slashdotters have enough time getting one girl, let alone multiple....
.. for cheaters and terrorists! :)
Now that I have company execs lured into thinking that just because the message self destructs it is safe, I can now write my next IM worm to copy their messages into another 'secure' location to be read by myself and my evil black hat henchmen and to be sold to the highest bidder! Mwa ha ha!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
I got a first post, but it self-deleted after 40 seconds...
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Only terrorists would want a text message system that will erase itself! Leaving no evidence of the message in history? Leaving no traces for law enforcement to track? This is not good... Our commander-in-chief-of-the-world, George.W will not approve.
Um... this sound like it is just a time-to-live applied to a service protocol... it's not exactly rocket science or a new concept. But they've got a buzzword to file off to the patent office. Fantastic!
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
communication is kept. (Including this one since I'm typing this on the office computer.)
Your SMS messages are no exception.
Since there is no way to determine what might constitute 'insider codes' for stuff happening, you can look forward to your SMS messages hnaging around FOR-bloody-EVER!
Work for an outfit with more than fifty staff in the US? (Notice it doesn't say where your head office might be because it doesn't matter.)
Your documents, emails, SMS messages and every scrap of paper has to be kept for at least seven years. If your company has archives, like most companies, the retention period extends into the ridiculous.
Keep your missives strictly about the task at hand.
Ever wonder why your cell phone doesn't work in certain buildings? They don't want any communications outside of the reach of the recording devices.
Don't say you weren't warned.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I signed up for an initial batch of 5 messages. I did of course immediately write two fairly sexual messages to girls I know, seeing as its anonymous. Great fun.
.. anonymous text messaging. I've got three left and then I'll unsubscribe, it's far too pricey for what it is. But at least I get to tell the boss what I thought of his new shirt without him knowing it was me :)
Anyway, nothing comes across as a text message. Rather, the phone will display the received item as a Service Command message. Clicking 'open' automatically starts the WAP on the phone, which connects to the StealthText server and displays the message. Standard operator charge applies however, so it's probably something that people are going to complain about when they notice that tiny increment on their bills.
But still
I see a very different story.
First off, FCC regulations prohibit unsolicited advertisements form being delivered to you if they cost you money directly.
Thus the reason it is ILLEGEAL for telemarketers to call your cell phone and also the reason it is ILLEGEAL for SMS messages to be used as advertisements.
If you are victim of a SMS ad I suggest you contact the FCC, file a complaint and then file a claim with the company for you $500 (I think it is that now) check for the violation.
Good luck complaining about offending messages and spam. Man - I'm missing the point here. Tell me again what good this protocol is?
In Soviet Russia, text message deletes YOU! I, for one, welcome our text deleting overlords! M$ is crap! Sony is crap! Linux Roolz!
Excellent! No more waking up in the morning feeling guilty that someone might have some incriminating evidence on you while text messaging drunk! I see the definate benefits!
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Controlling how long written information exists is tantamount to un-inventing writing. Written language ceases to be a permanent record and becomes a sort of buffered version of spoken language. The idea that communication, the foundation of civilization itself, would undergo such a giant step backwards for the sake of a business model completely boggles my mind.
Did you just copy and paste that directly from a forwarded email? Snopes.com has the same words, almost verbatim. And of course it's bullshit.
You are alloted a number of minutes.
Anyting over is up to 45cents a minute.
It is also illegel for telemarketers to call cell phone in the US.
I had it happen once, I told they guy, "you realize this is a cell phone right".
He promptly apologized adn hung up.
Saw an advert for it on Gmail. http://www.boomspeed.com/akito/GmailSMS.png
I like muppets.
who wishes it were available for use earlier this month.
Clearly, this is a bad idea.
All it will result in is more cyber-bullying, among other things.
"News 02/12/05: Boy arrested for phone text death threat" - If only this was available then!
>But it's much easier to just read it on Slashdot, in one place, when I
>can be sure that it will eventually show up.
Several times, even, in case you missed it.
I see that as a feature, not a bug.
Expect text message persistancy as an added value service next year, charged per minute of retency.
There you are, staring at me again.
a la Rammstein
Du
Du hast
Du hast 40 zeconds to read zis message...
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
You pose some very good questions. As for me, I'd rather be a little paranoid than sorry. : )
Um... I didn't RTFA or all the comments. what I have read is that is web-based and independent of handsets http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28293
Would make more sense to delete it after its read.
Upon recently turning 30, I told myself that if I'm ever working for a company again that tries something like this, I will stand up and say "That is a great idea! I don't see how it could possibly fail." Then, if by the end of the meeting I haven't totally convinced everyone who matters to drop the idea, I will quit or be fired.
You can spend hours telling me about how this will work for the majority of non-hackers and how it will be of some benefit to some very wealthy companies, but in the end all you're going to have done is waste investor money.
In this case, it is especially so. Because once any business driven benefit of such a service takes off and gains any kind of momentum, the hacks and workarounds and consumer desire to be rid of or take advantage of this fundamentally flawed concept will be fueled by that very momentum. There's nowhere to go with it that is of significant business interest that won't generate significant and more powerful subversion.
And I'm not saying this is a shining example of why we need the DMCA to protect innovation. I'm simply saying this is a lackluster / broken innovation that does not deserve financial success because it is so ignorant of how things work and so uncreative about how it solves a problem.
Anyone depending on this for any real "security" is an idiot.
I forget what 8 was for.
. . . will self distruct!
so now it will be that much easier for peope to ignore me
I remember seeing something like this about 5-6 years ago (during the
dot boom) for email (funny how the article mentions they plan to add
email soon). I don't remember the details, but I remember being
unimpressed by the tech.
Same concept as this article: You sent your email to the service, they saved
it on a server and sent the recipient an email with a link. After the mail was
read it was deleted.
I never heard about it again. I don't think the company made enough
money to stay in business.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
i can now harass someone via text messages and not worry about them having any evidense on their phone.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Alternative to a camera, should a screen capture be blocked by an application, is run it in a VM or under emulation like qemu or bochs and grab the screenshot via the host. I have no doubts that one or more VM/emulator will be revised to allow suffiently covert emulation (mapping physical rom into the emulation space, autopatching the code to NOP the jumps after the treacherous compare, overstamping a "known good" key, etc). There are far too many people interested in maintaining control of their computer and privacy for the twisted schemes to be anywhere near as successful as the promoters for it desire. There are people still running W98 on P3 laptops, for pity's sake, any expectation of upgrading HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of existing non-compliant machines is nothing short of laughable.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
me too!
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
what happens if the recipient has invested in "pencil" and "scrap of paper" technology?
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Can you say "Digital Camera"? I knew you could!
A ScuttleMonkey story not from **BeatlesBeatles....
No SPAM SMS messages please.
There's no place like ~/
Staellium UK (cell provider)
Err... no. These people are, approximately, nobody. They certainly aren't a "cell provider", a phrase which suggests to me that they operate a mobile phone network.
And you'd think that what is essentially an IT company would have a web page that worked, right?
To explain: Imagine if you get an email from your boss telling you to do something that you think is risky; a month later, when it backfires, you can't use the email to show that the decision was not yours. Excuses me? Is this slashdot? Don't we know how to copy/paste here? If your company (a) has magic disapearing email, you presumably know about it, so when (b), your company asks you to do something risky, you could copy/paste the text to file, forward the email to your own non-magically-deleting email account.
I trust the everyone reading this discussion is smart enough to know how to work around a technology like this. Good grief.
Alternative to a camera, should a screen capture be blocked by an application, is run it in a VM or under emulation like qemu or bochs and grab the screenshot via the host. I have no doubts that one or more VM/emulator will be revised to allow suffiently covert emulation (mapping physical rom into the emulation space, autopatching the code to NOP the jumps after the treacherous compare, overstamping a "known good" key, etc).
The technology to block this already exists (the Fritz chip, or whatever it's latest incarnation is called - I lose track). In fact, you could say that one of it's main purposes is to stop anyone running protected applications in emulators/VMs. The only way around this would be to emulate the chip itself - illegal in several countries, and not easy either.
Of course, it'll be quite a while before computers and other devices containing said hardware are common enough for it to actually be useful, if it happens at all, but that's beside the point.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
oddly, the captcha i have to type for this post is 'insipid', which is perfect to describe the joke that nobody catches, until of course, someone does finally reply.
Self-Destroying Photos? Here come the damn pedophiles...
..... I am quite sure that my copy of MS Word implements this feature.
I'm fairly sure that here in Australia, carriers do indeed keep copies of SMS messages routed through their servers. Since the messages are of trivial size, it hardly costs anything to keep them around temporarily. For example, last week in the lead up to the riots at Cronulla beach (which you may have heard of), there were a couple of text messages circulating urging people to show up at a certain time & place to "reclaim our beach".
The police have indicated that it will be trivially easy to find who originally sent the messages, indicating to me that they are kept on file, at least in the short term.
Try turning off hardware accelleration first.
"The media file 'Things Getting Blown Up III' could not be played, because no Protected Video Path compliant hardware acceleration could be found. [OK]"
I don't believe there will ever be measures that will prevent a cheap plastic single-use film cam from taking a snapshot of the screen...
Other than perhaps your local one-hour photo lab refusing to print photos that "look copyrighted" based on visible and/or invisible watermarks?
...is the transiency of information-as-conversation as opposed to information-as-corporate-document. E-mail, as it can be printed out and brought before a judge, is effectively a corporate document. However, a conversation has properties that are transient and ephemeral while also being subjective.
This is what the article gives when it says that
I'd like to use this technology on a few slashdot posts, x-girlfriends, spare tire around my waste... etc.
I don't remember details, but there was a case of an employee allegedly stealing proprietary company information where the case was essentially cracked by subpoenaing the IM provider.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Wow, perfect for terrorists!
So this "protocol" has to be implemented in the device? How fancy it must be.
<blink delay=40 repeatcount=1 >Hello, World!</blink >
B&W
Now watch the e-mail DRM system draw text as green on purple or other (garish) color combinations that foil black-and-white photography. (Ignore accessibility to color-blind users for now, just as DRM developers have ignored accessibility to users with other disabilities.) And if you're planning on using a color filter, watch businesses ban cameras that are large enough to have filters. (Many businesses already ban cameras on their private property.)
In the end, you can always take a picture of the screen with a camera.
Color or black-and-white? Both have issues.
black and white is very straight forward, and the supplies are cheap, and readily available to enthusiasts who want to "DIY"
Bringing a camera onto the employer's private property without prior authorization will still result in confiscation of the camera and termination of employment.