My daughter was sending my wife an email message about a sensitive
subject. She saw a button labeled "Confidential" in MS Outlook, and
decided that was appropriate.
OK, so my wife receives the message on her Win98 box with Thunderbird
and can't open the message. There is a link explaining stuff she has to
install, but it will only install on Win2k or above.
So she forwards it to me on my XP box. First, I install the basic
infrastructure to handle DRM; then a plug-in for IE6 so that it can be
used as a viewer for DRM'ed content (registered under .rpmsg content).
Then, on opening it up, I had to authenticate with my wife's MS Passport
account. You must be OK to read the "confidential" message if you have
an MS Passport account (the Mark of the Beast?). If I'd been on a local
MS network I think there was some provision that I could have
authenticated locally. So I don't see that the authentication proved
anything except that we were In With Bill[TM].
Hopefully this silliness won't catch on. My daughter now knows better.
I presume there won't be a DRM plug-in for Thunderbird anytime soon,
nor one that can be installed on a Pentium 166 under Win98. Will the
DRM stuff be operable under OS X, or is it totally closed technology?
My wife and her sister tried out PGP e-mail encryption about six years
ago, I think. (A) It worked fine, on much older machines, and (B) the
users had full control. But I guess those points were both bad things,
eh? ;-)
Vic
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