Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: <RANT> Cart00ney-Sigs
From: bkfsec <bkfsec () sdf lonestar org>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 11:18:41 -0500
J.A. Terranson wrote:
Not only that, but in the case of an agreement pertaining to something within the email header (like an e-mail address), the notice of secrecy would have to be made before the header was displayed or parsed.Forgetting for a moment that you cannot bind someone to an agreement just by having them READ IT, you may want to consider that you also can't bind them to a secrecy agreement AFTER giving out the "secret". To put that into English for those who are common-sense-impaired: you have to assert a right of secrecy BEFORE divulging the "protected" information. If you let a secret out BEFORE getting an [valid] agreement to maintain such secrecy, what you have done is to place your supposed secret into the public knowledgebase, from where anyone can do pretty much as they want (albeit subject to a few scattered and mostly unenforceable restrictions such as copyright). If you really, *really*, *REALLY* want to try and assert an agreement of secrecy, you MUST place the "agreement" BEFORE the beginning of your post. Of course, that means displaying the Cart00ney up front, where everyone can see that theres no reason to read further ;-)
One could argue that the presence of the address/name on the main view of most mail clients precludes the "agreement" due to lack of notice, and that programatically, the program parses the headers first, and as such they are not subject to the notice of secrecy.
In other words: it's probably technically impossible to bind this agreement to a name/address on e-mail in the first place.
Or, even better, don't subscribe/post to security mailing lists from a corporate e-mail address. Considering the content of these lists, advertising the location of your guarded items is generally not advisable under most circumstances. Of course, this all depends on your circumstances.Now, as for those "Confidentiality notice"s you see on large company email systems, where the lowly little luser has no control over what his moronic email admin has automatically tagged to the bottom of the email: You DO realize that there is absolutely zero case law that holds these "notices" to be enforceable, right? As a common courtesy, people *may* CHOOSE to abide, but they don't HAVE to. And when you send something to a public list like this, you have completely wiped away even the common courtesy argument. I would suggest that you ask your legal department to advise your email admins to stop making your companies look stupid in public.
-Barry _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Current thread:
- some interresting project i just stumbled across... Oliver Leitner (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Vincent van Scherpenseel (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Vincent van Scherpenseel (Feb 02)
- [OT] Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Vincent van Scherpenseel (Feb 02)
- Re[2]: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Alex V. Lukyanenko (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Vincent van Scherpenseel (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Michael Simpson (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Darryl Luff (Feb 04)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Oliver Leitner (Feb 04)
- <RANT> Cart00ney-Sigs (was: Re: Freenet clone) J.A. Terranson (Feb 04)
- Re: <RANT> Cart00ney-Sigs bkfsec (Feb 04)
- Re: <RANT> Cart00ney-Sigs (was: Re: Freenet clone) Frank Knobbe (Feb 04)
- Re: <RANT> Cart00ney-Sigs (was: Re: Freenet clone) Nick FitzGerald (Feb 04)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Darryl Luff (Feb 04)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Vincent van Scherpenseel (Feb 02)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Oliver Leitner (Feb 04)
- Re: some interresting project i just stumbled across... Jeremy Bishop (Feb 04)