ZKS Shutdown
Ian Goldberg
iang at abraham.cs.berkeley.edu
Thu Oct 4 11:44:39 PDT 2001
In article <5d175bdfd6756456a92c5c0941e3a137 at dizum.com>,
Nomen Nescio <nobody at dizum.com> wrote:
>Zero-Knowledge Systems is reported to be shutting down their Freedom
>network and product. A letter has apparently been sent to subscribers
>with the bad news. Could someone please post a copy here? Does it say
>anything about the reasons? Just lack of money, or something related
>to 9/11?
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 (note that this isn't the letter that was sent out; this is
something new):
With the release of Freedom 3.0
(http://www.zeroknowledge.com/media/pressrel.asp?rel=10042001) 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 (i.e.
http://www.zeroknowledge.com/media/pressrel.asp?rel=08152001), 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 mailto:corporate at zeroknowledge.com
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
prospects in these markets.
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