Zero-Knowledge's Freedom Network to shut down.

October 4, 2001 7:34 PM

Zero-Knowledge's Freedom Network to shut down. The network provided Internet and email anonymity. I always found it very slow and cumbersome, and stopped using it in favour of SafeWeb many months ago.
posted by tranquileye (5 comments total)

Is there any discussion of why, anywhere? I was expecting something on the cryptography list, but it seems to have passed without comment (or the list may be down for a mo).

I wondered how much the given reason was accepted as being true, and how much as an excuse.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:25 AM on October 5, 2001

I prefer VirtualBrowser, myself. But I'm picky.
posted by silusGROK at 8:46 AM on October 5, 2001

They couldn't make money from it. They cycled through a TON of money getting it all going, but then found they didn't have a consumer product anyone wanted. ZKS was always more of a cause than a company in the early days, and although people get excited about causes, they don't necessarily buy them.

They started the transition to building enterprise software a while ago - over a year - but now it looks like the transformation is complete.

They've lost lots of talented folks in this process as well, including (I'm pretty sure) Stefan Brands, who can now count three cos who have done nothing with all his digicash patents. I'm not sure what Goldberg is doing.

Part of the problem? They never had a clue that they could, or how they could, leverage the web to make things work effectively. They built some decent corpo sites, but they could have done so much more.
posted by mikel at 2:48 PM on October 5, 2001

Speaking of VirtualBrowser, look who's listed in the toolbar of their example screenshot!
posted by fraying at 7:27 PM on October 5, 2001

Man! It's Christian Science Monitor... I didn't think anyone read them besides me!

Cool.

: )
posted by silusGROK at 1:14 PM on October 10, 2001