Slashdot Mirror
A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
Jake writes in with the story behind an explosive NYTimes scoop last week. It seems that the Times's pharmaceutical industry reporter, Alex Berenson, scored a page-one blockbuster when he revealed that Eli Lilly was looking to reach a settlement with federal prosecutors over the company's alleged inappropriate marketing of anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. A settlement figure of $1 billion was mentioned. This scoop dropped into Berenson's inbox when a lawyer for one of Lilly's retained firms mis-addressed an email to a colleague with the same last name as that of the Times reporter. Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame, but this has not been confirmed.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
Update: 02/08 17:19 GMT by KD : Jake writes in with an update: it seems that while Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper Hamilton, that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the Eli Lilly settlement talks. Berenson got his story from other sources.
I notice the software is being blamed rather than the user.
Don't click the link, goes to shock site and screwes with your browser.
this is my sig
No doubt about it.
If you are not the intended recipient of this response, please disregard and forget this posting.
You are legally binded from reading, forwarding, printing, copying, remembering, discussing or in any other way acknowledging this post.
I am planning on robbing the bank on Fifth and Elm. Do not alert the police. Meet me at the warehouse after.
captcha:overlook
Tired of that pesky work getting in the way of having fun? No problems, with our new email auto-complete, work will never be a problem again. Tired of looking competent. Too few opportunties to end your career over a simple typo? Problem solved with auto-complete. People will blame you the dumb user for making the smallest mistake at any time of the day or night and regardless of your workload. With auto-complete your career is guaranteed to end in the jiffiest of jiffies.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've gotten stuff from all sorts of folks - including the Times - because my gmail address is just may last name, and people seem to always forget to include the first letter of a first name, or they leave off stuff before a period: bob.smith@gmail.com or bsmith@gmail.com becomes smith@gmail.com.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I use pine for my email, and I have never had these issues. The fact that I'm not a lawyer dealing with billion dollar settlements has nothing to do with it.
but I'm sure they can afford PGP/gnupg AND a highschool kid to show them how to use it.
but if I were running a major law firm that regularly handled confidential matters for multi-billion dollar clients ... I'd certainly encrypt the Hell out of every communication that left my offices. I mean, all they had to do was install some free (free!) encryption software like PGP, and there'd have been no problem.
Huh. I'll bet they will now.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Zyprexa
I was on this terrible crap for a while...after 2 weeks I had gained 15 pounds (not exaggerating).
I remember finding myself on the candy Isle at the supermarket shoveling 12-packs of twix, snickers, and all kinds of other candy into my shopping cart...and I usually don't eat sweets.
These 'medications' are really horrible...it's sad that so many people believe schizophrenia is easily treated with them. Big pharma marketdroids are mostly to blame. In fact, after 6 months, 80% of the people on these medications quit (I suspect the other 20% are forced to take it by hospital staff)...they actually prefer being crazy (unable to work, take care of themselves, go to public places, etc.) rather than take them...the side-effects are that bad.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I telnet to port 25 and type my emails into the server by hand. If I screw up, I have to start over. You pine users have it easy.
Link to virus, or just an infected host...
...I'm sure that it will be.
PINE! Egads, man, 'twas old in the nineties.
So how was the drug inappropriately marketed? and why is that allowed to be kept confidential? and where does the money go if the government won the case?
this sort of thing wouldnt happen if people implemented propper DRM on sensitive content.
As I tried to explain to one of the Three Letter Acronyms of our company this morning, "Auto-Complete" is not to blame. "Not Paying Attention" is to blame. If you can't be bothered to look at who you are sending stuff like this to, then please step back from the computer and have someone else handle complicated things like email for you.
Surely if you are doing billion dollar deals then you can afford to hire someone capable of working a keyboard without embarrassing him or herself.
Your honor, I don't know what he's talking about. I never saw anything after the word "NOTICE:".
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The headline is misleading. Eli Lilly was going to pay the $1 billion anyway, regardless of who received the email. They simply didn't want anyone to know about that.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
So how legally enforceable are all those disclaimers I get in the footers of e-mails warning me that the e-mail is confidential and if I am not the intended recipient of the e-mail I am required to delete it immediately?
Why was the reporter's email address already in the lawyer's address book? They should check his mail logs and see what else he send to that person before.
Trolling is a art,
The problem is between the chair and the keyboard.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Dudes, you should see the crazy shit I get.
Signed,
Pritchard Cheney
I left one company and went to another. Email addresses were identical but for the domains, i.e., myname@oldcompany.com/myname@newcompany.com. Friends who had me in their work address books (Outlook/Exchange setups) reported that they simply could not get rid of the old entry. Every time they typed my name in, Outlook would complete the old address. The new address was present in the address book, and the old one was nowhere to be found.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
It's interesting how some people are suggesting using encryption. I wouldn't be surprised to see an email like this; "Dear Eli, attached is the encrypted document. Regards, Your laywer PS: the password is zomg!1billion"
Almost all the mails coming out of many corporations have some standard boilerplate appended to them. Something like, this email communication is super confidential and if you got it by mistake, promptly delete it or we will come and sue you, your brother and your guardian angel too. Really really bizarre language, sometimes stretching for half a screen or more, with the actual email contents less than one line. So are these lawyers going to find the value of adding that boilerplate or what?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
the person who couldn't be bothered to check is to blame.
This is like blaming spell checker for a spelling mistake.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Many corporates enforce (global) software suite standards like Lotus Notes. Enter the wrong address separator, say semi-colon instead of comma, and Lotus Nuts will helpfully choose someone with a similar looking name somewhere else in the world-wide corporate address book to send your mail to. No doubt lots of other apps masquerading as mail clients must have features like this.
I would kill for Thunderbird or gmail at my workplace, but it is Forbidden.
SLM
If these guys would use PGP or some other form of encryption, then even if you did send something critical like that to the wrong address, it wouldn't be so devastating. The technology to protect email has been around for nearly twenty years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
hmm. there was an instance recently of a legal firm getting a court to agree that publication of their letters was an offense. whats the legal ground here? I presume the document had legal statements included in the front of it - but I assume they are only applicable if they are signed or does journalistic laws cover this as free speech?
I'm kinda hoping somebody with more knowledge on this subject can help me out so when the scoop of a lifetime lands in my inbox I can do something about it! Presumably the times journalist is smart enough not to publish if he runs the risk of being sued.
Slightly offtopic: Eli Lilly is another of the creepy companies the Bush family has deep ties with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eli_Lilly_Controversy#Eli_Lilly_and_the_Bush_Family Are they just attracted to grody companies of dubious morals, or do they help make them that way?
enum Bool { True, False, FileNotFound };
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/absquatulate Henry James mist have made up that one.
Do you want to solve all of the world's problems? Let is all out, let it all be public information.
... and so forth.
This includes: your tax returns, your paychecks, your bank statements.
This also include your politician's tax returns, paychecks, and their bank statements.
Also: Blackwater's tax returns, paychecks, and their bank statements.
And Pharma Industry's tax returns, paychecks, and their bank statements.
What? You ain't got nothing to hide? Let's all see the flow of interest money for what it is.
But schizoaffective disorder is a devastating illness: it's just like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. The risperdal I took previously for my psychotic symptoms wasn't working anymore. From 2003 through 2007, I was in the emergency room five times for psychiatric reasons, culminating in an ambulance ride to the mental ward, where I stayed for three weeks.
The Zyprexa completely eliminates the paranoia and visual hallucinations I would otherwise have almost all the time. It also brought me down from the bipolar mania that led to my ambulance ride, and prevents me from getting manic anymore.
As a result of taking it, I am able to hold a steady job - and a good one - as a software engineer, to provide for my wife and to pay her University tuition.
I've heard rumours that Zyprexa might be withdrawn from the market. I really hope that doesn't happen, as I've never had a medicine work so well.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
This is slashdot so it must be Microsoft's fault, it IS that easy.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
IMHO, that's just wrong.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
If the lusers can't tell the difference between Alex Berenson and Bradford Berenson, why would you assume that they were competent enough to use PGP or GPG? Pretty bad when a law firm that's probably billing a thousand dollars an hour or better needs to hire a high school kid to proof read email addresses.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
GPG is a piece of software which implements, among others, the RSA public key algorithm. If you rely on encryption you should at least know the basics.
I had a lady from my company's payroll send me the list of 70+ people and their annual bonuses for this last year. I'm a programmer, the email was intended for a VP with the same last name.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Saying and thinking that all email should be encrypted is fine, but law is a service industry.
If the client doesn't want to encrypt things, you can't.
The client pays the bills; they call the tunes.
Every client has some different cock-i-may-me procedure for everything and you need to follow that procedure for that client. PGP may be a nice SOP (standard operating procedure) but in a law firm there is no SOP.
DOH! ^32
Some guy bought a motion-sensitive webcam, pointed it out his window, and set it up to email him whenever it took a picture.
Except he misspelled his own email address, and the images started coming to me, a complete stranger.
I stitched all the shots together into this time-lapsed movie:
http://knodi.com/images/floral_park/time_lapse.gif
Austin is more fun than Dallas.
Back when I turned 18 I got thing in the mail from the Selective Service suggesting that if I had not already registered with them, I could simply put my name, address, date of birth, social security number, etc on the back of this handy dandy prepaid postcard included and stick it in my mailbox. I've seen this mentioned a few places, including a transcript from Congress at some point a while back when someone brought it up, but as of a year and a half ago or so they are apparently still mailing these things out. At the time I felt like I should have been shocked, but for some reason I wasn't...
That pretty much assumes that the encryption is done out of band. Personally, most usable variants of email encryption are handled by the client itself (at least as an initiant). At some point, when you select "Jim Smith" as the intended recipient, you have to expect that it will be delivered to "Jim Smith" in a format that he can open, regardless of any interim encryption. This might involve encoding it with his public key, but that wouldn't help the fact that you meant to send it to "Jan Smythe" now would it?
Any more intrusive method just wouldn't be used in the real world, since the hugely vast majority of all emails are actually intended to be read by the person that the author listed in the "To:" field. Any kind of catch-all solution smacks of vistaNag.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
http://wcohen.blogspot.com/2008/01/measure-twice-cut-once.html
The original idea: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/#sw and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wcohen/postscript/sdm-2007-leak.pdf
I've just installed it. Seems to works for me.
I remember when some fucktard in the House Judiciary Panel sent an open email to every whistleblower and Dick Cheney as was reported here on slashdot and elsewhere.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -Scott McNealy
This is exactly why Scott's idea isn't entirely a bad thing. The fact is, there is a certain amount of parity.
You and I don't necessarily have privacy from Eli Lilly Corporation should it try to profile things about us in order to make up a more compelling lie to get us to try its products.
But, much to its surprise, Lilly doesn't have privacy either as it tries to negotiate an enormous payoff to the government to escape the consequences of one of its screw-ups.
The dystopia is clearly the idea that consumers and citizens are helpless pawns of the big corporations who can skilfully control outcomes to be anything they want, by controlling their messages and carefully monitoring what people are thinking. They'd get away with murder, because they could always tell what's going to be deemed acceptable and what has to be covered up.
The reality and the counterbalance is: it will always be possible to catch information that's off-message when it slips through holes like this one, and that opens up the controlling corporation to the force of public opinion.
They don't have privacy either. If they insist on being monsters- opportunities will arise to bring that to light.
Keep the parity. Make sure these entities remain vulnerable to mistakes of this nature. If they arranged it so that if you publicised the leak you were sent to Guatanamo Bay, it would be quite the chilling effect- you've got to protect freedom of speech w.r.t. stuff that's accidentally leaked. The burden of self-protection has to stay on the company's side, they can't make it your responsibility to not reveal their shattering secrets when you're not actually part of their organization, or might actually be their enemy.
First of all, if we got rid of all the lawyers, this would have never happened. As far as the disclaimers go, what if I acted on the contents of the email before got the bottom of the message? The disclaimers are always at the bottom of the message, perhaps scrolled off the screen where I couldn't see it yet. Couldn't I claim I never read the disclaimer?
"Some online observers are speculating that auto-complete is to blame" How about blaming the fucking moron that sent it to the wrong person.
my little niece once wrote "$1,000,000,000,000 trillion" in an email and sent it to the wrong person. Should I inform slashdot ? They might be able to come up with a grossly exaggerated headline about it.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Please define in which way exactly a person taking medication is not "him" anymore, in which way this differs from the myriad other tools we use and changes we undergo, and why this particular change is somehow not desirable (which you don't say but clearly imply) and in particular, how it is worse than living
with untreated mental illness.
It sounds like you believe that personal identity is some kind of magical ghost in the machine that (for whatever reason) gets tainted by medication. Fine if that's your belief, but please don't try to push it on others.
The "evil drug-pushing psychiatrists" bit is also just silly. It is your freaking choice whether to take the medication or not. (Except for the case of involuntary treatment, where the issue is indeed more difficult, but that's a minority.)
I apologize if my tone was a bit too offensive -- but you probably have no idea how sick and tired of that line people who do need these medications are.
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
PGP doesn't protect against human error. Using PGP still consists of picking a recipient for the email, if you pick the wrong one PGP only makes sure that you have a nicely encrypted session with the wrong person.
I haven't messed with this for a while but you can fool Outlook and the users a different way.
Outlook and all of the Blackberry devices I've used by default will only show the common name in the from field. I don't think it even has to exist in the GAL either.
Assume the HR Manager of company.com is Sue Smith
Craft an email with a from of "Smith, Sue" with an rcpt to CEO at company.com
When CEO replies to that email, it will most likely just show "Smith, Sue" in the To field of Outlook and BB devices but will really go to sneaky_pete@hotmail.com. Sure, not foolproof and the user could always select "show address" but how many people do that? Just about NONE.
You can take it a step further and actually use "Smith, Sue" in the from field but specify your own reply to: header of "Smith, Sue" . Outlook will show, yep, its from Sue and a reply will show Smith, Sue. Again, how many users use the "Show Internet Headers" option for every email they get.
Problem with this second method is most companies do not accept mail from the outside addressed from their own domain, well at least they shouldn't. This would still work internal to the company though as Outlook requires "permission" to send on someones behalf, you can always connect directly to the SMTP service of the EX server via telnet or use Outlook Express that is installed on most machines by default and be whoever in the company you want to be to send email. Use one of those walkup machine in the copy room and use a reply to field of some yahoo account.
If you or I were charged with a crime with a penalty of ONE BILLION DOLLARS it would be all over the papers but Eli Lilly can do the whole thing behind closed doors. What kind of justice is this? Would have the whole thing have been covered up had the email not been misaddressed? Isn't Bush Sr. on the board of Eli Lilly?
This will make more sense.
I haven't messed with this for a while but you can fool Outlook and the users a different way.
Outlook and all of the Blackberry devices I've used by default will only show the common name in the from field. I don't think it even has to exist in the GAL either.
Assume the HR Manager of company.com is Sue Smith
Craft an email with a from of with an rcpt to CEO at company.com
When CEO replies to that email, it will most likely just show "Smith, Sue" in the To field of Outlook and BB devices but will really go to sneaky_pete@hotmail.com. Sure, not foolproof and the user could always select "show address" but how many people do that? Just about NONE.
You can take it a step further and actually use in the from field but specify your own reply to: header of Outlook will show, yep, its from Sue and a reply will show Smith, Sue. Again, how many users use the "Show Internet Headers" option for every email they get.
Problem with this second method is most companies do not accept mail from the outside addressed from their own domain, well at least they shouldn't. This would still work internal to the company though as Outlook requires "permission" to send on someones behalf, you can always connect directly to the SMTP service of the EX server via telnet or use Outlook Express that is installed on most machines by default and be whoever in the company you want to be to send email. Use one of those walkup machine in the copy room and use a reply to field of some yahoo account.
Posting without a Karma bonus because I just want to make sure that this poster understands the situation:
Yes, that's right, it absolutely won't have an effect on negotiations. That was the point of the post, to assure you that as a matter of law, their bargaining position hasn't been compromised at all because the settlement information can't come in at trial anyway (and the strength of each side's case are the bargaining chips in negotiations, not some dollar amount that the press accidentally found out.) Generally, any information obtained during negotiations, or even in this case--the incredibly boring revelation that negotiations took place--cannot come in as evidence at trial. This is an well-known evidentiary rule, and the point of it is that there is a strong public policy concern for encouraging settlements between parties, so as to not needlessly burden the judicial system. And the best way to encourage settlements is to make sure that the parties can be as candid with each other during negotiations as possible without having to worry that what they say can be used against them at trial. Both parties are free to continue negotiating. No harm, no foul.
That's why the information revealed in this leak doesn't matter, and why the focus of the story is on the far more interesting [i]way[/i] it was leaked. The prosecution cannot utter a word about this at trial, regardless of what the press knows or doesn't know. Eli Lilly is still in great shape, they just might want to consider getting different counsel! Was this an embarrassing screwup by the lawyer? Absolutely. Will it have any kind of extrinsic effect, like causing a dip in stock prices? [i]Maybe[/i]. But will it matter in a potential trial, and therefore prove damaging to Lilly's position during during negotiations? Absolutely not.
I just glanced at this and realized that the preview button probably would have shown me that I needed to use HTML tags. But oh well, hopefully, I've made myself plain enough! :)
I do declare, y'all ah crackin' me right on up! Next thing you know, I'll be wearing white seersucker and suspenders like Matlock.
:)
Obviously, making typo-free posts in the midst of Super Tuesday excitement is not a forte of mine!
I was the campus token conservative columnist. He was very flamboyantly gay. Our university email addresses were generated off of initials plus, since we had a catastrophic hash collision, one distinguishing digit which people botched quite frequently. He got my death threats, I got his love letters, and neither of us was very happy with the matter.
... [Ed: I think it is for you]
... you [Ed: I think this one is for you] ... you [Ed: No, read it more carefully] ... you [Ed: Ah, whoops, my apologies] ... you [Ed: No problem. Hey, FWIW, I think he was out of line]
We both maintained a pretty good sense of humor about it, though. These were typical, with the vile language excised:
FWD: You fascist
FWD: I want to
RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: RE: FWD: I want to
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I wonder what kind of juicy information I could get if I had a bill.gates@microsoup.com email address. Hmm... ;)
If these guys would use PGP or some other form of encryption, then even if you did send something critical like that to the wrong address, it wouldn't be so devastating. The technology to protect email has been around for nearly twenty years.
No, it wouldn't. Most PGP software uses the email address of the recipient to look up their key. If you chose the wrong email address for the email, you could just as easily use the wrong email address for the key.
When I reply to a mail that has one of those notes attached, I sometimes add my own non-disclaimer. Something along the lines of
I am not at all bound by your one-sided disclaimers. I feel free to disseminate, publish, or otherwise use what ever you happen to mail to me. If you want to keep your secrets confidential, start by not sharing them with outsiders! I may be willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but at a high price!
I have not received any serious replies to such yet, only LOLs etc.
It started in fun. And what I had meant to do was simple: go to the end of a line and backspace to delete what my girlfriend had just written playfully into an email: a graphic description of what I had just done to her, and perhaps what more we were just about to do. She had even jokingly hovered the mouse over the send button. Me, an Emacs user, how could I have known?
In Eudora, Ctrl-E means SEND A SEXUALLY EXPLICIT EMAIL TO YOUR GIRLFRIEND'S FATHER.
For me, it meant the end of the line.
Lawyers really don't have a sense of humor! I always thought that was a stereotype.
The technology itself exists, but not necessarily in a easy to use format for users to keep track of, say across machines (PCs and mobile devices), via webmail etc.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Thanks for that comment. With all the Tom Cruises of the world, crackpots, and media hysterics about 'psych drugs', you can't hear enough from the 'silent majority'. That is, the people who actually have mental disorders, and who've experienced an increased quality of life due to proper medication.
Personally, I could almost say that Zyprexa saved my life. It did play a part. Last year, I was suffering from a clinical depression, which progressed into a psychotic depression. I was locked in the clutches of depression while getting more and more paranoid and delusional. Luckily enough I didn't progress to outright hallucinations, although my perception of reality was certainly distorted.
If nothing had been done, I would be dead now. It was only a matter of time before I'd have taken my own life.
Luckily, I got help. Spent two weeks in the hospital, being given Zyprexa and Atarax, the former as an antipsychotic, the latter as an antidepressant. After two weeks (when the antidepressants had kicked in) I was released, and continued with them for six months. Today, I'm competely back to normal.
Now, I can't really compare Zyprexa to other drugs; this is the only time I've had such an episode, and hopefully never again. But I can say that the drugs DO work. And work well.
And I'll also say that I've got no history of any mental disorders (or in my family). Most people consider me to be a very stable person, mentally and emotionally. Point is, while we don't all have the misfortune of having a chronic disorder, a psychotic episode can literally happen to anyone.
Where's that guy with the Oedipus .sig when you need him?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In other news,
"Geeks May Learn Forums By Data Mining"
"Geeks' brains can effortlessly do what the most powerful forum with the most sophisticated software cannot: learn the language of trolls simply by observing it used. A ground-breaking new theory postulates that geeks are able to learn large groups of troll tactics rapidly by data-mining."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Here is a link to information about the Zyprexa papers.
That's not the problem. It's not like these reporters just magically end up in the address bar; they end up there because big companies are required to have a certain amount of communication with the press.
I work for a media company, and this kind of crap happens all the time, and it's not just email. You get a pile of documents, and in the middle of the pile there is that one sweet document that you were never EVER supposed to have.
Or the email where you make it on to the CC list after something juicy has been said farther down the email.
Secrets are kept by people. There will always be mistakes.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Zyprexa
--- This meme is memory intensive
Yep, all too easy to do with any email app. You MUST read the entire email before you click send! I make it a point to read the content, the subject and then finally a check of who's going to get it, especially double check if your using email groups! Groups can mask people you might not want to see the email content. How can you blame the software? "Sorry I cut my fingers playing with the knives you guys make at your factory. Can't you stop making them so sharp?". Sorry, but regardless of how it happened, it's simply the senders fault, no one else to blame.
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
And in some people it is completely lost.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
PGP keys are often chosen at the same time as recipient email addresses, and automatically as well. Otherwise, it's just too much of a usability hassle to stick, except for the email messages which truly demand secrecy.
Only a decent proof-read of the letter would prevent this. The webforum crowd, even at slashdot, cannot hold a person to be anything like diligent in proofing.
This is one of those things that Notes is good at (as opposed to all the things we know it is BAD at). You just et up a rule on all your mail databases that any message with "confidential" on the subject line can't be forwarded to people who aren't in a specific address book with a public encryption key. It's one of those things that isn't hard to do if you understand how the system works, although it is a bit mystifying for the cheap help.
I guess it's possible to do similar things with most MTAs: intercept confidential messages and pipe them through some kind of encryption system, but again, the cheap help might have difficulties.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
>> It also just occured to me that with disclaimers such as : >> >> "This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and >> intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are >> addressed. I always read those as though they said, "We're total losers who couldn't proofread an e-mail address if our business depended on it, which our lawyers advise us is actually the case. Instead of setting up an easy-to-use address book to handle and verify addresses, we are going to put some totally meaningless and legally-irrelevant boilerplate on every message we send so that there will be no doubt as to our total luser-itis. "If you received this e-mail by mistake, we're screwed, because we can't bind you to a contract just because you read something you shouldn't have. Not only that, but by the time you read these instructions about how you weren't supposed to read it, you would have already read through the stuff you weren't supposed to read... and boy doesn't that make us look like complete morons... if there was any doubt earlier. "All that is assuming we included some information that would let you determine that you are not, in fact, the intended recipient of this e-mail. Which we probably didn't, because we've heard that 'redundant' means 'unnecessary', because that's what they called the guy who used to sulk in the basement and make the computers go before they fired his ass."
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Right, but at that point the encryption itself is adding little or no value. The rules engine throwing an exception when a confidential message is sent to the wrong person is what would stop the original problem from occurring - and would be a much better solution, even without throwing potentially complex and confusing encryption systems into the mix.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
You missed the part where the email admin at some downstream ISP notices the message in the logs and gets a free inside stock tip.
In any case, the thing about Notes is that the encryption stuff is mainly confusing to administrators, not users, which is as it should be.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And intuitive design....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.