'Vanish' Makes Sensitive Data Self-Destruct

Developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington, "Vanish" is a pretty revolutionary piece of software designed for the highly sensitive environment of digital exchange. The premise is that via a firefox extension users can essentially self-destruct any message after a given amount of time.
Both the sender and recipient must have this tool installed. If a user highlights any sensitive text entered into the browser and presses the "vanish" button which encrypts the information with a key unknown to either party. This allows the text to be read by the recipient when they use the "unscramble" button but after eight hours the message will be impossible to unscramble for anyone. This appears to work for any form of text entered online including Facebook and blogs.

source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/07/21/1522255/Vanish-Makes-Sensitive-Data-Self-Destruct?from=rss