this would be similar to those cards that we give to friends and family for birthdays and special occasions. the idea would be to go to stationers or cornershops and purchase a special email attachment on a cheap disk. like birhtday cards and wedding cards, you would be able to see on the cover the type of graphics and the type of text content that you would be sending. they would all be designed by web specialists to assure a range of different styles and high quality, and would be checked for viral content prior to distribution.
it is just that i am a little tired of using emails to say special things and i like the idea of making an effort from time to time. i know a present would be better, but sometimes long distance can be a problem and the ordinary post can be too slow. any thoughts?-- janet2, Mar 03 2004 Halfbakery archaeol...onservation society [hippo]'s nemesis [pocmloc, Mar 05 2024] So you’d go outside, to an actual physical *shop*, to buy an attachment for an email that you wanted to send?-- hippo, Mar 03 2024 In some cyberpunk dystopia, yes; you would do this because the faster, cheaper process of linking to an on-line resource would be vitiated by the downsides of exposing to some *them* the fact that you are in a "happy birthday" relationship with a particular other person IRL. Granted, the email with the attachment would still pass over the internet, but it could do so via an anonymous "dead drop" account, and the cheerful attachment could be encrypted with a key drawn from a hard-copy one-time pad. Or maybe, that encryption key could be inferred from the text of the messages on the yellowing hard-copy greeting cards which remain on the shelves of the corner shop for no apparent reason.-- pertinax, Mar 04 2024 //you would do this because the faster, cheaper process of linking to an on-line resource would be vitiated by the downsides of exposing to some *them* the fact that you are in a "happy birthday" relationship with a particular other person IRL. //
I'm not sure whether you're mocking the concern, but I've been in tech for decades and I KNOW the harm that is done via those links, networks, shadow profiles, and etc. I might pay for this service, online of course, just to get a place with a decent privacy policy and a pretense of security. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.-- Voice, Mar 04 2024 //I'm not sure whether you're mocking the concern,//
And I'm not sure to what extent we *are* living in that dystopia. Maybe it's worse for some people than for others. Certainly, if I were important enough to have enemies, this sort of thing would be a real concern for me.-- pertinax, Mar 04 2024 20 years old idea?-- po, Mar 05 2024 [po] - part of my campaign to drag unannotated ideas from the HB vaults-- hippo, Mar 05 2024 well done - carry on... :)-- po, Mar 05 2024 //birhtday//-- xenzag, Mar 05 2024 Xenzag yeah right whatever-- po, Mar 05 2024 random, halfbakery