ZKS Shutdown

[Tim May]

On Thursday, October 4, 2001, at 09:57 AM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> It's on Slashdot.
> http://www.freedom.net/prem.html - shutdown warning
> http://www.freedom.net/support/article.html?article=410 - warning that
>         with fewer servers, your anonymity is less protected
>         from traffic analysis
> http://slashdot.org/articles/01/10/04/1526256.shtml - discussion
>


I just saw Ian Goldberg's latest message on this. Here's most of it:

Re:Ian Goldberg, Bruce Schneier & Whitfield Di (Score:1)
by Ian Goldberg on Thursday October 04, @01:38PM (#2388977)
(User #526438 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
Believe me, no one is more disappointed about this than I am, but right 
now there simply isn't enough market buy-in on the premium services to 
justify the network's operating costs. :-(

As a business, we are focusing on the product that customers and 
partners want. Here's an official Zero-Knowledge Systems statement on 
the matter:


With the release of Freedom 3.0 [zeroknowledge.com] and the 
discontinuation of the Freedom Network (our anonymous browsing and 
encrypted pseudonym service) there have been a number of questions for 
more details about the decision to stop offering the Freedom Network 
services. Hopefully this will help clarify things.

When we released Freedom 1.0 close to 2 years ago we saw a significant 
percentage of our users subscribe to the premium Freedom Network 
services. This was anticipated as our early adopters were very privacy 
and technology aware and had expressed strong interest in the Freedom 
Network offering.

As we began to increase the distribution of Freedom into the mass market 
with the release of Freedom 2.0 & 2.2, we saw a disproportionately high 
percentage of users who subscribed to the standard features (and not 
Freedom Network services). The initial interest in the premium (FN) 
services amongst our early adopters simply didn't carry over to the 
mainstream and as our user numbers grew, we began to realize that the 
market was looking for the kind of features we are now offering in 
Freedom 3.0.

As we began our feature triage for Freedom 3.0 (almost 9 months ago) we 
heard from customers and focus groups of users, as well as channel 
partners [zeroknowledge.com], and reflected on the statistics from our 
existing user base, and decided that there was not enough mass market 
demand for the premium services to justify continuing the service.

This was entirely a market related decision. The market demand for 
consumer Internet security and safety tools has grown considerably in 
the 4 years our company has been in business. Freedom 3.0 is a strong 
competitor to security offerings from companies such as Symantec and 
McAfee and we have gotten very positive market support and a warm 
reception from channel partners to this new version of our suite of 
privacy and security tools.

There has been speculation that this decision was somehow related to 
government pressure or was made in the wake of the tragedies of 
September 11. This is simply untrue. For the past 3 months we have been 
beta-testing this version with partners, getting certification from 
Microsoft for our drivers and completing our Alpha and Beta cycles with 
our beta users. Support for the Freedom network offering was removed 
from the client code base well before the recent tragedies of September 
11.

Our research team is continuing work in the area of privacy enhanced 
network protocols, and we are open to any suggestions the research 
community offers on how we can leverage the work that went into the 
Freedom Network design and operation to advance this area of computer 
science. If you have suggestions or interest in this, please contact us 
at corporate at zeroknowledge.com [mailto].

Zero-Knowledge continues to offer our consumer protection utility 
Freedom 3.0 and we are very excited by the prospects for this product. 
We also have a division that is addressing the market need of enterprise 
privacy technologies that stem from managing consumer data that require 
strong security and policy frameworks to adhere to privacy regulations 
and customer preference management (Healthcare; Financial and other 
consumer data that is subject to new security, privacy restrictions 
relating to legislation like HIPAA, GLB, PIPEDA, EU privacy directive).

Our company continues to evolve and focus our efforts on market needs 
and customer demands and we remain very confident of our prospec