>>Steve, are you suggesting that making documents into active >>content is a good idea? >> >>Microsoft Outlook letters with embedded scripting is bad enough. >> >>Why not keep the documents on a central server, and the only >>way you can access them is through a browser-type client which >>enforces anti-screen scraping features. >>... >As always, if a pair of eyeballs can see something, the jig is up. >All the talk of "anti-screen-scraping" is just b.s.
The Disappearing Ink folks addressed the retention problem by mailing documents in an encrypted form that you could only decrypt and view by connecting to their web site to fetch your key (or maybe it was for them to decrypt; I don't remember.) Whenever your document retention period said they should forget the key, they would erase it, making it impossible for you to recover documents later. They addressed the screen-scraping problem by saying "That's not the problem we're trying to solve - way too hard. We're trying to solve the business problem of erasing messages that both parties to the message really do want to have erased. Trying to solve the other problem would be snake oil." I have seen paper with anti-screen-scraping features, though. My wife made a photocopy of a prescription so she could deal with the insurance people about it and found that the copy had the words "ILLEGAL COPY" all over it. I'm not sure their watermarking technique, but apparently there are anti-photocopying prescription pads. It used to be possible to find dark purple paper for making hard-to-photocopy documents for more secure environments, but color scanners have rendered that useless.
