Retractable Emails
178 words.
This is not strictly political but I suspect partisans and politicians would be very interested in this. :) I heard about a free email service on WRVA (that is perhaps the longest, ugliest url I have ever seen) this morning called “BigString.” Basically it allows you to change or retract emails after you’ve sent them. (The name comes from yanking back your embarrassing drunken emails with a “big string.”) I haven’t investigated exactly how they do this (ie. javascript or images or what), but the mechanism works (I assume) by grabbing the email content from the BigString servers each time you view the email in your regular reader, which allows them to do all kinds of nifty tricks like changing the content or capturing reader statistics. Technologically it’s kind of cool idea, but I rather hope it doesn’t catch on. There needs to be more accountability in Internet communications for society to evolve, not less. Also I would imagine there are a number of privacy issues, seeing as how BigString will know exactly what you’re reading and when.
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