BBC & Microsoft PR: Email Snake Oil

- - posted in Ancient Archives

There’s a growing trend of very lazy journalism here: Microsoft Press Release appears, and someone at the BBC publishes it with little or no critical analysis as a news story.

Knights rescue old Star Wars story and Star Wars Knights game shines (in two days!) : Advert for an X Box game

and the latest, excellent…

Microsoft launches ‘leak-proof’ e-mail

You can’t do what MS claim with real email. In a closed Exchange based system it would work for a while, but in the real world, running real email clients and servers, it cannot work. This is client-side security - my email client or local server can simply choose to ignore the self destruct header in the email message. Just more proprietary snake-oil and threatening DRM, creeping in with misleading publicity.

If you want to secure email, just use PGP, but security is a process, not a software feature. People leak information, not email clients. And with the UK’s lovely new laws, refusing to reveal your email contents to the Police can results in prison time, encrypted or not…