Usually, this meme is supposedly just a cliché in futuristic action movies in which the main character receives a sensitive message that cannot be read by anyone, so it blows up. Researchers at the University of Washington have developed ways to make messages “blow up” after they have been read. Not in the sense that you will get a letter, read it, and it will burst into flames the second you are done, but e-mail. The message you read can be set on a timer, and once the timer is up, the message will deleted permanently from any servers, and any other people’s mailboxes. The new software will called Vanish and it will require encrypted messages for the service to work.
The service is part university experiment, and partly made out of necessity. Many companies use these services because more and more, things are being stored using cloud computing; storing data online rather than in personal computers and data banks.
Cloud computing is useful because the Internet has an unlimited amount of space, and is free to store on. This saves companies money on saving the information, and protecting it, and it allows them to use their saving space for other useful things. This also protects the information from being lost if the company data base were to collapse.
This presents some safety hazards though, as the companies themselves are not ensuring the messages and data anymore. The messages and other data then sit on these often unsecured servers for an extended period of time, just waiting for someone to unrightfully gain access.
The concept of the self-destructing message is not new however. Some documents in the past have been wired to do this, but Vanish will be the first publicly released software to give these capabilities.
The software is groundbreaking and necessary in today’s society. These important messages are just sitting on unsecured servers waiting to be hacked, and if they are, sensitive information and data would be released to people who were never supposed to see it. This can also be used for public e-mails too. There are situations in both the public and private world that would warrant the use of this technology, but right now the aim is at big business people.
The technology is made with security at the top of their list. First, the selected message will be written by the sender, and then encrypted with a high quality encoding service to make sure that if it is somehow intercepted, all the hacker would see is a bunch of hieroglyphics. Then, when it arrives at the recipients desk(top), it will be unencrypted so that the user can get the data and read the message. Then, if the user decides delete the message then, no qualms, but if the user forgets or simply decides not to do so, the sender can put a time limit on the message so that it will delete itself.
While this program is still in the developmental stages, the technology is almost ready to be released, and could prove to be an asset for business owners and family members alike.
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