ZKS Shutdown
Tim May
tcmay at got.net
Thu Oct 4 11:50:29 PDT 2001
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
More information about the Testlist
mailing list