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Asia Buzz: Time Bomb
This column will self-destruct in five seconds
By ERIC ELLIS
August
3, 2000
Web posted at 4:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 4:30 a.m. EDT
Picture the scene: You've fashioned a killer business plan that will forever solve the dilemma of making money off the Net. And it will also take out the competition, with whom you've been having talks about a merger, because neither of you can figure out how to make money off the Net. But as you whip off your plan to your business partner, or cranky banker as the case may be, you realize to your horror that the e-mail address you are sending it to is...your competitors. That's a common slipup in Cyberville, known as the "OhNosecond," named after the horror felt in the split second you realize your mistake as you see the mail disappear off your screen and into the cyber mailbag.
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But fear not, a remedy is at hand. Log onto Disappearing.com and download the software. Once enabled, you will be armed with a device that can delete e-mails when and how you want them. The software embeds a little time bomb in the e-mail, which can be a few seconds, or years. You set the expiry time and the offending e-mail will vanish from the receiver's inbox. Magic.
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Everyone's got office horror stories. Maybe you were gossiping about a colleague and clicked on the wrong name in your address book. Maybe you're having a torrid affair with the boss's spouse, who has the same name as the boss, or perhaps you were rude to your mother--and you let her know--and now you regret it. This is the software for you.
Bill Gates could have used it in his browser war with Netscape and the Justice Department. Microsoft was crucified by the incriminating e-mails bounced around their senior personnel. They were better unwritten, but once they were, they were certainly better unread by non-Microsofties. And how we all salivated--until it became boring--over Monica Lewinsky's musings on "Him."
Seriously, as we transfer our professional lives online, e-mails are increasingly becoming legally binding documents. Japanese manufacturers have done a huge business over the past 20 years with shredders, destroying sensitive paper documents into illegible strands that only fanatics like student folIowers of Iran's late Ayatollah Khomeini can put back together--as they did with CIA papers during the year-long U.S. Embassy siege in 1978-79. But shredders are useless in the e-age.
For me, Disappearing.com is a little like Jim Phelps of the old Mission Impossible series, or Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt today. You know, as the time bomb wick burns down on Phelps/Hunt's assignment, the information being relayed by the chief is so top secret that "this tape will self-destruct in five seconds." It was poor English, but it was a great line that's now part of popular culture. Surely a modern-day version is "this e-mail will self-destruct in five seconds."
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