Comments on: “Whatever happened to Zero-Knowledge Systems?”

By: Iang (fc7)

Iang (fc7) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:01:29 +0000

One of the things that was obvious with ZKS is that it didn’t have a business model. The technology was fine, world-beating even, but the lack of a focus on business was a killer, and this was evident from the start. Nowhere was there a discussion of what consumers or businesses wanted to buy.
This is and was pretty much typical of technology-driven startups, and is why I included the “finance” layer in the FC7 model. Literally, an entire layer devoted to the business of making money, which by the rightness of its positions, drives requirements down to every other layer.
I’m glad they are now focussed on the customer instead of the cypherpunkian tradition of protecting everything, and damn the cost. If I was a sensitive person, I’d be dead by now watching the hundreds and thousands of companies that think they can move the world with technology, alone.
(which, to no small extent includes my own ;)

By: Johnath

Johnath — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:37:57 +0000

Adam,
Just in case you had lost track (which I doubt) – some large percentage of the old ZKS crew seems to have reconverged around Mozilla. Seems like every third coworker I meet here used to be ZKS. I was in university in Toronto at the time, but I would have swept ZKS’s floors, just to be there when they were doing what they were doing. I still have that barcode ad in some downloaded-graphics folder somewhere.
Cheers,
Johnath

By: mario contestabile

mario contestabile — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 11:09:39 +0000

Yes Tor can be s-l-o-w; Zks learnt that the hard way.
Proxy servers (with SSL in between if possible) work much quicker than onion routing.

By: wirespace

wirespace — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 08:31:19 +0000

Last time I tried tor it was so slow that it was allmost unusable.
How about services like anonymizer?

By: mario contestabile

mario contestabile — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:40:05 +0000

The world changes. Adam is at Microsoft. Zks provides a security suite. The Eagles reunited…
Tor is the closest thing I’ve seen to what we, I mean Zks, offered 8 years ago.
Still, better a security suite than a Web 2.0 applet!

By: TorUser

TorUser — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:05:25 +0000

There are always those companies that fail in any market. Young markets are young markets. They do better when the rest of the markets are growing. More of your competitors can survive off your scraps.
My point was that RadialPoint didn’t have anything spectacular that I saw. Great that their lineage is from ZKS. Current Tor is the new ZKS. RadialPoint is some other tangent of what ZKS could have been.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:18:26 +0000

As far as I know, the tracking users implication isn’t true either. The segmentation is (as I understand it) things like “users who have had the AV service for 6 months, but not the anti-spyware.”
So the platform has the ability to deliver messaging, but not the ability to say, track where you browse and use that for marketing.

By: Thomas H. Ptacek

Thomas H. Ptacek — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:27:01 +0000

So, if you take the motivation issue (the “why”) out of my comment, the rest of it is true? I see how the market could lead you from anonymizing users (noble, low-margin) to tracking users (ignoble, lucrative). Is that all that happened?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:08:11 +0000

Tom,
I don’t think it’s a 180, although you might try to spin it that way.
The technology that Radialpoint is selling derives from parts of the Freedom 1.0 software. We had a firewall in there, and maybe other security components. The market didn’t go the way we wanted or expected. Some big companies marketed their security offerings as internet privacy. ZKS had both client software and server elements to help manage their use. The company spent huge amounts of time talking to ISPs about what what they wanted, because we wanted ISPs as both a channel to users, and to operate Freedom network nodes.
So the offerings evolved. You can paint that as ironic, or compare it to the many other companies who shut their doors, leaving their shareholders high and dry.
And TorUser, if you think a rising tide lifts all boats, you clearly have never watched a young security market. Companies go away all the time.

By: TorUser

TorUser — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:43:26 +0000

Thomas,
You are correct. I have listened to a sales pitch from RadialPoint when they were on-site trying to sell my company their products. They are just like the rest of the vast wasteland of “security is a product” vendors on the market today.
As for their profits, great. All boats rise with the tide (the tide that is security products).