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by lawfulcactus 2556 days ago
It's worth mentioning that all these measures can be fairly trivially defeated by the analog loophole[1]. I suppose it's harder to prove authenticity in that case, however.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_loophole

4 comments

Allow me to sell your organisation some VR goggles with iris-reading DRM protection. Your browser won't display on any other screen. And Google Services won't work in any other browser.
I can still remember the message (or at least important bits) and can write it down when at home or tell it to other people.
Yeah but it is still a helluva lot harder to leak it, and it isn't as good as showing an email exchange.
Sure it's harder, and it will not stand up in a court of law probably. But there probably have been and still are a ton of spies, national and industrial, who do exactly this, memorize things.
for now
Well, presumably most communication is two way or actionable. If not, then there is no reason for the communication in the first place.
This is an arms race. Allow me to use an iris app on my smartphone to defeat your iris-reading DRM while I take a video of the content.

It's not possible to do what Gmail wants to do without a SCIF.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...

You're making broadly wrong assumptions about what Gmail wants to do here.
As an employee of a very large corporation, are you trying to claim a special inside knowledge about the strategic thinking of the corporation. Are you in or do you report to the C-suite?

If not, consider that you might be making your own broadly wrong assumptions.

Don't bother. Someone will figure out how to either fit a small camera into the VR goggles, or separate the iris-reader from the display part.
There are undoubtedly a variety of ways to bypass things for a motivated attacker. Analog is likely only one of those.

The thing that a lot of these measures protect against is not so much a targeted attack, it's stupid user tricks. It's not protection against Jane the Spy extracting as much information as she can, it's a measure against Danny the drunk who leaves his laptop at a bar or sitting in the back seat of the car where it's visible and stolen.

There are also likely a lot of places where it would be illegal to use something like this with auto expiring messages, though hopefully most such places won't be using Gmail.

But as a worker in a corporation, the chances that you would want an email so badly that you start breaking more corporate rules trying to get a copy of an email is very unlikely at least for common everyday work.

This could be a useful feature when dealing with PHI, legal, HR, etc.

I know people who have taken photos of protected documents with their phones to send to their team, because IT couldn’t get their permissions working properly. It seems like it’s not worth the risk to break an obvious rule like that, but when you’re the manager the responsibility lands on you to get your team the info they need.
What's the "risk"? You're going to get in trouble? Get a talking to? The risk is near zero.
Yes, that's the risk exactly. If you start taking pictures of PHI on your phone over and over eventually your manager like the one above you is going to get fed up and drive you or fire you out of a job.
>as a worker in a corporation, the chances that you would want an email so badly that you start breaking more corporate rules trying to get a copy of an email is very unlikely

This seems like it should be true, but having worked with end users in the past I would not take this for granted

You're right? I guess we should just allow end users to do whatever they want. /s
That's not what I said, what I implied, or anywhere close to the point I was making. Nice attempt at a witty comment I guess...
I disagree, there have been politicians that go through the trouble of setting up their own email server in their basement because the official way is too arcane or not comfortable.
They said corporation, not government. Do you have an example of a low level employee or C level executive using private email server for their official communication.

Disc: Googler

The analog loophole can’t prevent leakage but steganography can trace it back to its source. Iirc Windows 8 prerelease copies used to put an imperceptible watermark on the screen of the user account. When a leak was published to the news a simple filter would tell Microsoft who to fire.