and like that...he's gone

"VaporStream Inc...allows consumers and corporate users to send email and instant messages that can't be forwarded, saved or printed and leave no electronic record after they are read". But take-up is slow and paying customers are numbered only in the thousands. Says WSJ (which incidentally has a really neat new feature so that if you copy a block of text off their site it automatially includes a thing saying "read more at..." with a hyperlink. Smart, guys, very smart).

Which begs the question (amongst others) - what about a basic screen capture? What, indeed, about simply taking a photograph of the damned screen? Sending an email that leaves no trace is a moronic ambition in the first place and unacheivable in the second - if you want to have a conversation off the record so that you can deny it later, sit down, with just one other guy, and tell them what you want them to hear. Keep doing it, one guy at a time, until they've all heard it. Sure it takes longer, but this is conspiracy 101 folks.

The challenge here isn't that people are too dumb to know they need to buy this thing for a few dollars a month - it's that they're not dumb enough to imagine they do when the workarounds are obvious and trivial and the real solution otherwise.