aalevy - Slashdot User

Comment Fight's for user rights in court is a bad metric (Score 3, Interesting) 69

by aalevy on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:08PM (#47018261) Attached to: EFF: Amazon, AT&T, and Snapchat Most Likely To Rat On You To the Gov't

In every case where the company did not earn a star, they report says it should not be seen as a demerit, as they may just not have had a chance to or not been able to report it. Doesn't that make it a poor comparison metric? Especially in comparison to the others...

Comment Quotation reference mistkae (Score 1) 171

by aalevy on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @01:01PM (#28771689) Attached to: 'Vanish' Makes Sensitive Data Self-Destruct

The quote 'Our goal was really to come up with a system where, through a property of nature, the message, or the data, disappears' should actually be attributed to Prof. Henry Levy, not Amit Levy. The confusion was probably caused by the press release only refers to the last name.

'Vanish' Makes Sensitive Data Self-Destruct 171

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 21, 2009 @12:14PM from the also-doesn't-appear-to-be-a-fire-hazard dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports on new software called 'Vanish,' developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington, which makes sensitive electronic messages 'self destruct' after a certain period of time. The researchers say they have struck upon a unique approach that relies on 'shattering' an encryption key that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange, but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system. 'Our goal was really to come up with a system where, through a property of nature, the message, or the data, disappears,' says Amit Levy, who helped create Vanish. It has been released as a free, open-source tool that works with Firefox. To use Vanish, both the sender and the recipient must have installed the tool. The sender then highlights any sensitive text entered into the browser and presses the 'Vanish' button. The tool encrypts the information with a key unknown even to the sender. That text can be read, for a limited time only, when the recipient highlights the text and presses the 'Vanish' button to unscramble it. After eight hours, the message will be impossible to unscramble and will remain gibberish forever. Tadayoshi Kohno says Vanish makes it possible to control the 'lifetime' of any type of data stored in the cloud, including information on Facebook, Google documents or blogs."

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