Create Self Destructing messages for Emails, Facebook posts, Orkut, Web Chats etc. with Vanish

You want to share something personal against your boss with your colleague; you want to send some mushy love notes to your girlfriend/boyfriend; you had steamy chat session yesterday night. In all these cases one thing is common that you don't want to leave behind any trace of your internet activities. And if you can send messages which can destruct itself in few hours .... AMAZING..... you would say.

On Internet the data lives forever. Even if you delete the data, it can be retrieved. But this is going to change due to the technology called Vanish. The credit goes to the research scholars Roxana Geambasu, Yoshi Kohno, Amit Levy and Hank Levy of University of Washington. They describe Vanish as

"Vanish is a research system designed to give users control over the lifetime of personal data stored on the web or in the cloud. Specifically, all copies of Vanish encrypted data — even archived or cached copies — will become permanently unreadable at a specific time, without any action on the part of the user or any third party or centralized service."

The amazing thing about Vanish is that it can erase posted data anywhere on the web. Be it Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, Google Docs etc. However right now it can be done only in Firefox right now. In order to use this install Vanish. It has two components, first one is Vanish System - install this in your computer (Windows, Linux, Mac) and the second one is Firefox Plug-in. Once installed allow it to boot strap for 5 minutes. To use it select the text of the message and then right click the mouse button and select "Create Vanish Message".

In order to read the message select the encrypted text and then right click the mouse button and select "Read Vanish Message".

The Vanish Current prototype deletes data using the natural churn on file-sharing P2P networks. For each message Vanish send it creates a secret key which is not revealed to user and using that key the message is encrypted. And then the secret key is broken into several pieces and then it is spread in the P2P networks. As the file sharing network are on constant change as computers are logging and leaving the networks constantly. And due to this when some key pieces are lost the message cannot be decoded. In this case the sender also cannot retrieve the data.

Currently Vanish works only for Text, however the developer are saying that the technology can be extended to include images or any kind of data form. Vanish also has "Online Version" for those who do not want to install this in his computer. Give Vanish a try and let me know your feedback.

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