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Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Rights Management is the hot thing of the minute. It doesn't make since for you since you are the ultimate destination, but in many cases we need to transmit information and also take steps to ensure that the recipient does not forward that data anywhere else without our permission. If we are going to still be responsible for the data's privacy after it leaves our network then we are just going to never let it leave our network.

These unfriendly encryption mechanisms also let us actually retract a message if it was sent to the wrong person, a feature that is on the honor system in traditional implementations.

On the user end all they know is that if they put [encrypt] in the subject they won't be written up by their compliance department. People really like not getting fired over clerical stuff so they over-use it.

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So, I understand the motivation, it's the misguided implementation that's the problem. The only thing from your suggested requirements that actually works is the ability to "retract" an email before its been read.

It can still be forwarded (after extracting from a badly implemented site). The "ensure the right person got it" password is stupid as its literally sending it to the same email address.

The thing I find so bizarre about this is that lawyers/accountant etc. have been seeing out letters in the post forever and never had the desire to implement this level of security. Post can be intercepted, read by third parties and modified at will, just like unencrypted email. The only thing that's changed is that because there is supposedly the ability to do it someone has lobbied for there to be a mandate for it.

Just because it "can be done" doesn't mean is should or that it achieves what the motivation was.

If there is something that important that it can't be in the wrong hands then either do it in person or sent a courier with the signed for letter that requires id on delivery.

These systems are nothing other than security theatre that's sold to the unknowledgeable as something they need, when the reality is it's a complete waste of everyones time. (except for the person selling it!)

It would be extremely expensive to mechanize the dragnet stealing/modification of the post. I agree the current solutions for electronic communication are stupid but there is concern about the many vectors and attacker could get all the data.

The fax only ones are the dumbest though because on both sides everyone is just using electronic documents.

I got a proposal last year from a vendor where I wasn't allowed to copy or download the text. They were one of a handful of proposals I got, so since I wasn't able to share they're stuff with other decision makers they put themselves out of the running. We do take steps ourselves ourselves for communicating sensitive data, but my point is that there can be costs to overusing systems like this.

> in many cases we need to transmit information and also take steps to ensure that the recipient does not forward that data anywhere else without our permission

This is pretty much impossible. It's DRM. It's a pain in the ass for everyone while still not preventing the thing that it is supposed to. The analog hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole) is always there if nothing else.

Please don't encourage the use of broken software that is fundamentally flawed. I'm not unsympathetic to the goal of controlling the spread of certain information, but when the product plain doesn't work (preventing selecting the message text isn't stopping a cell phone pic for example) and it gets in the way of regular rule-following folks who have to take their time to get around it that's not helping anyone. It's just a total waste of time/money for all involved.

yes or like how my kernel driver reverses the polarity of your webcam to emit an infrared laser which makes it nigh impossible to photograph the screen,

which our internal research shows is the typical way of exfiltrating information when right click is disabled by javascript

wear eye protection

To me that is all just unreasonable expectations in the first place. None of the reasons people want that kind of control and knowledge are valid excuses for the overreach. It's just something they want just like the countless things anyone wants.

All across the board MS picks the wrong people to say 'No, tough shit, gtf over yourself." to. They say it to normal users who want to do reasonable things, instead of to business owners and managers who want powers they have no moral right to.

It's fundamentally impossible to control information after it is communicated, no matter what technical gimmicks you concoct, and so it's invalid to even try in the first place. It's barking up the wrong tree and only harming the innocent and not even hindering the criminal.

If something is that precious then keep it in an airgapped lab and frisk people for cell phones at the door, and get nothing much done with that data that's so inconvenient to access.

If you need other people to access the info, then get over yourself and simply have people sign standard legal agreements. If the recipient gets hacked or something then they get hacked. That will still happen regardless. The annoying special access didn't change anything. A hacked client machine can siphon that same data.

MS just doesn't ever say "get over yourself" to the right people. They say it to you & me but treat the most offensive ideas from buisiness owners as very serious and valid needs.

It's made them a lot of money so it's not changing of course. I don't mean to pretend that there is any way or any remotest hope to change that. Only to point out how it's fundamentally wrong, and one of the reasons to simply try to avoid using any of their products and services as much as you can manage.

Goes all the way back to read receipts. The knowledge of when exactly I viewed a correspondence is obviously useful to a sender, but that usefulness does not make it something they have any right to, no matter what the excuse or rationalization is, no matter how much you try to invoke important sounding things that the message might have been about or how important sounding the consequenses like if a court case hinged on proving that you received a message or something. Not only does no one have the right to that knowledge, the mechanism doesn't even prove what it claims to prove anyway. A read receipt still does not prove that I read a message, only that an email client performed the transaction. If you really need an ack for a message, then you have the recipient, the person, send an ack, as in send another message back. Or send the message via a process server. If it's not important enough to justify a process server, then it's just not that critical and you should just get over yourself and accept that the recipient will get to it when they get to it, and you will survive not having this bit of control and visibility into someone else's life.

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