One of my first jobs in journalism was as an editorial assistant at Astronomy magazine, located in Wisconsin. One of my responsibilities was to read and answer reader letters and emails. Back in 1999 there was a big controversy about the Cassini spacecraft doing a flyby of Earth, to gather up some gravitational energy and slingshot out to Venus. The rockets are nuclear-powered and lots of people were nervous about that, thinking that some radiation could find it's way to Earth.
The magazine had a story about the controversy coming up in a future issue. We advertised that upcoming story in the magazine and someone wrote a letter railing against us for even thinking about publishing such a piece. And also criticized the article and the author.
I answered that person via email, asking him how he could criticize an article that hadn't been published yet. And welcomed him to send a letter to editor after he read it. He replied. Then I replied.
He published the whole email exchange on his website and for years (this was 1999), the link to this site was the first one that came up when you Googled my name. YEARS!
I thought of that personal story when I read about a group of researchers a the University of Washington who have developed a prototype computer program that make emails, text messages, Facebook posts and chat messages automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. No one would be able to access them, not even the sender.
It's called Vanish, and it works by basically putting a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser.
It doesn't work for everything and it's still in the prototype stage, but as the New York Times article about this technology points out,
I sure could have used Vanish back in 1999. By the way, these days that notorious Cassini email doesn't come up as the first one when I Google my name. In fact, I just looked for it now and it's on, like, page 4 or 5. And I'm happy to report that Cassini flew by without incident.
Tags:
comments ( )