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ZeroKnowledge to Discontinue Anonymity Service
VulgarBoatman writes: "ZeroKnowledge, providers of Freedom.net and Freedom privacy software, have abruptly decided to stop providing anonymous web browsing and private, encrypted, untraceable email for its customers. They give users 7 days before the system is shut down and all untraceable email addresses are disabled. They also say that your "secret" identity may not remain a secret for long." Well, note that that last link is a warning about using the service during the shutdown period, not a warning that they plan to compromise nyms in general. At least they're offering a refund. Update: 10/04 19:00 GMT by M : ZKS has a statement in the comments below.
.. but doesn't it seem a little strange that this comes in the wake of september 11th? Who's pressuring them to discontinue annonymity?
It's a shame sure, but like the article says- it's all down to people finding other ways to do it themselves rather than rely on somebody else. It would be nice if they gave advice to their existing nyms on how they might be able to maintain their privact though
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
Nope. $59.95 for 5 identities - each good for a maximum of 1 year.
"Because I love Pat Benatar." -- Britney Spears, when asked why she covered Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll"
My question is, how did billing for the service work in the first place?
Umm, account #12344234 owes us $300... but we don't know who it is, or where he lives...
I think their business model didn't work... the collections department had nothing to do...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
My money says it's all because of the September 11 attacks. From being a "cool" thing, companies offering anonymity services seem to be less cool in the eyes of the unwashed masses.
Trolling is a art,
Remember anon.penet.fi?
This is even more depressing, because this time the company running the service has pre-empted the government pressure to shut down, and gone ahead and done it before the lawyers arrive.
Eek. DOes anyone else get the feeling that the terrorists might actually be winning?
These sigs are more interesting tha
First off, when ZeroKnowledge closes, all of its customers will be forced to find another provider. That will make the other providers 1) more profitable (assuming they aren't taking a loss but making it up in volume, like Amazon); and 2) more effective. As mentioned in the warning to their customers, low volume makes it easier to correlate traffic entering their system with traffic leaving their system. When such a system gets sufficiently large, it will be very difficult to correlate input streams and output streams, because of the sheer number of possible matches.
Secondly, the closing of another anonymity service will make it harder for terrorists to operate on the internet. They will have one less place to hide. And that has a positive effect on law-abiding netizens - because when communications are more traceable and less anonymous, the government will have fewer excuses to pass legislation that gives law enforcement more snooping powers. And that benefits us all.
-sting3r
"Zero-Knowledge is introducing Freedom Privacy & Security Tools 3.0, the next generation of its online security software for consumers. This new software includes a personal firewall, form filler/password manager, ad manager, cookie manager and keyword alert. As a result, we have decided to focus our main development efforts on this product as well as other software solutions providing online security.
As such, I regret to inform you that Freedom Premium Services - Anonymous Web Browsing and Private Encrypted Email - will be discontinued as of October 22nd, 2001. Please refer to the detailed Freedom Network shutdown timetable below"
So basically they are winding down their subscription based business model, leasing nyms (4 minimum as far as I recall) on an annual basis and going with a shrink wrap product.
I'm holding my breath to see what the reviewers have to say about this Tool kit v3.0 - it may provide what most users are looking for.
holy smokes, when i read that a zero knowledge system was discontinuing anonymity, I thought
that it meant that slashdot was going to stop
posting by AC's!
No collections department, you paid in advance for a year's service. If you wanted to ensure anonymity, you could sign up online, get an account number, and write that on an money order. You could also pay by credit card - they claimed to have an internal system to remove the linkage between the payment and the account.
I suspect that various governments are bringing pressure to bear. Hotmail et al are probably next. See this article at
Best Slashdot Co
as ppl have pointed out .. one is safeweb.com another alternative is idzap.com
Yesterday, I received the following message in response to questions about upcoming changes in services and offshore servers (emphasis mine):
:(
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 09:56:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: InfoReplies@zeroknowledge.com
To: @freedom.net
Subject: Ref: "New anonymous browsing service"
Hello,
Thank you for your interest in Freedom. Currently, we are unable to release specific details about our upcoming privacy services; I wish I could provide you with more information.
As for the servers, the upgrades should be completed shortly, and more servers should appear on the network. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Regards,
Freedom Support Team
Have a question? Looking for answers? Visit our Knowledge Center for up-to-date solutions to common problems.
http://www.freedom.net/support/knowledge.html
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
It seems to me the government should offer a free anonymizer service, with the proviso that detection of verifiable illegal activities transacted through same would lead to the immediate disclosure of the sender's identity (or at least location) to the appropriate legal agency. Private anonymizer services should not be allowed (at least within US borders).
This would then be a way for whistle blowers and others not engaged in illegal activities to easily, and with better legal shielding, submit their disclosures or air their personal political views. Mailing death threats, circulating child pornography, arranging for killings, or setting up drug drops shouldn't have any kind of guarantee of hiding the sender's identity.
I can already hear the big sucking sound from civil libertarians -- "HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY TRUST THE GOVERNMENT WITH THIS?"
It would seem trusting private individuals with this isn't much better (and the government gets what they want eventually anyway). Perhaps using a private anonymizing service shouldn't imply that someone has something to hide, but in the minds of many, it does.
Being intractable on this issue will hurt the IT community more in the long run, because it closely associates it with the ability to conduct illicit and untraceable activities. I am more worried about being being prevented from using cryptography, or being forced to register the keys with a government agencies. Here is where the battle should be fought, because it will lead to the real government oversight of the flow of sensitive information.
Yes this probably comes as result of 9-11-2001. Stop burying your heads in the sand and telling yourselves the world isn't any different now.
Letter To Iran
I am an ex-ZKS employee, and you - are a troll.
.GIF's and JPEG's on the web?
Do you really think you can stop people from developping or using encryption or anonymity? There a rumours Ben Laden uses steganography - should we ban all
Most employeess at ZKS believe in protecting our rights, and in preserving privacy versus what is perceived by many as intrusions of a police state future into what was otherwise a "free" internet. As Phil Zimmerman said:, "if you ban strong crypto only the terrorists and criminals will have access to it."
The liberals in Congress think they're sounding like civil
libertarians with their new, modified stand on Internet
surveillance. They say that the authorities should be allowed
warrantless taps to find out where you surfed, but not what you did
once you got there. The FBI has a right to know that you went to
Amazon, for example, but without a warrant they don't have a right
to know what books you bought. The legal distinction here is from
the old days: a "pen register" would record the number you dialed,
but not the conversation itself, and therefore qualified for a
looser legal standard.
But pundits don't realize that 99 percent of your Web activity can
be reconstructed from the Web's equivalent of "pen register"
information. The search terms you enter into search engines are
attached to the address itself. Do you believe that the FBI will
want this portion of the URL excluded simply because they don't
have probable cause? If and when the NSA is authorized to monitor
the backbone, do you expect that they will chop off the URL at the
question mark, so that this information is kept out of their
keyword-analysis supercomputers? Not likely.
My reading of the provisions of the new Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001
suggests that a single, one-time certification by a federal
law-enforcement official that such information is needed in a
criminal investigation, without any showing of probable cause, is
enough to require a court to issue an order allowing a pen-register
tap on any Internet service provider presented with the order,
throughout the entire U.S. The definition of this "pen-register or
trap and trace device" information has been expanded for the
Internet. It now includes "other dialing, routing, addressing, and
signaling information reasonably likely to identify the source of a
wire or electronic communication (but not including the contents of
such communication)."
For example, some federal official could conceivably serve Google,
or any other search engine, with a court order demanding log
information for all those who searched for particular persons or
particular combinations of search terms. The "query strings"
consisting of the users' search terms are, in all standard HTTP
server logs, included along with the user's domain or IP number.
One hopes that search engines would be inclined to challenge such
an order. But we may never know, because if they decide to
cooperate with the new law, their public relations office won't be
announcing this. The bottom line is that the phrase, "but not
including the contents of such communication," might be useful for
excluding the body of e-mail messages, but is mostly irrelevant for
Web surfing. This poor wording in the new law may mean that search
engines can no longer claim privacy at any level.
If someone wanted to redesign the entire Web for the express
purpose of surveillance, they couldn't do a better job than what we
already have. The profile that could be compiled if one had a list
of all the Web sites you visited, or all the search terms you've
used on Google, would be very revealing. The latter scenario is
more worrisome, because the former scenario, short of a
comprehensive backbone tap, would imply an order served locally at
your own ISP. You'd almost have to be pre-targeted by the
authorities. But a tap on a general search engine would amount to a
global sweep for information. Google currently gets about 110
million searches every day, most of which are from outside the U.S.
It would be tempting for the feds to monitor this traffic.
The technical problem is that their service uses Javascript, and doesn't work if you're not running Javascript. That means that any time you're using the system, you're vulnerable to any other JS problems on any other web page your browser encounters, until you turn JS back off. IIRC, Safeweb does attempt to clean up JS and other dangerous stuff from pages it displays to you, but it's still a risk. Also, I'm not that impressed with their Javascript, though I'm not an expert on the stuff - my problem was that under Mozilla ~0.91, they pop up windows to do the secure browsing in, and they're not really quite the shape of my screen, though that could have been Mozilla's fault. I sent email to the Safeweb folks about the fundamental "You're using Javascript" problem, and got a really prompt reply from their technical management, which was good, but they fundamentally didn't get it, which bothered me.
The other problem is trust - in general, you always need to be concerned about whether a service like this is trustable, both because of the intent of the people running it (are they ratting you out to somebody) and the security of their systems (if their server is 0wned by CrackerZ, you're not secure.) As I mentioned, Triangle Boy is really cool - it's a sort of distributed set of volunteer-run anonymizing servers, which keep moving around to prevent blocking services from blocking them, and Safeweb announced that they were going to be using this to provide censorship-free web access for people in China, the Middle East, and other places with censorship problems. The catch - they've got funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture fund. It's probably entirely legit, and certainly good enough for most purposes - but how paranoid you need to be depends on who's really out to get you. ZeroKnowledge was very upfront about what their trustability levels were (plus I knew the folks there, and they were well-connected to the cypherpunks community.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think I left ZKS several months back (on good terms, etc., etc.).
I think that Hamnett's message says it all (they couldn't afford to keep operating the network, because of that traditional operating-cost-vs.-revenue balance).
I think that gov't pressure -- should any have actually existed; I don't recall much such pressure from when I was there -- had nothing to do the decision.
I think they picked a very hard market nut to crack, and chose a very high bar for the level of security and privacy they were going to provide.
I think the market didn't share their (our) enthusiasm for that level of service, perhaps unfortunately.
I think a lot of people have talked here and elsewhere about how the Freedom network could have been done better, from technology or marketing or whatever perspectives...
...but I think nobody has done a better job so far of that type of network service.
I think they've learned a _lot_ about protecting privacy and helping other people and organizations protect privacy.
I think there's a market for that knowledge, and good applications of it.
I think they're going to be OK.
I think you shouldn't really care what I think.
(I think Craig's still a dork.)
Closing an anon remailer or anon web proxy is not going to stop terrorism. Neither is putting backdoors into encryption schemes, or making National ID cards that people will be required to carry. They are great deterrents tho.
Before the internet there was terrorism... and unfortunately terrorism will continue.
A step in the right direction would be tighter immigration laws. Better security on flights, and letting the millitary do their job (no more bullshit police actions).
But closing down a remailer or web proxy won't stop anything. It's paranoia. Why can't the terrorists set up their OWN anon remailers or proxies. Hell they could revert to using RFC1149 technology with a Honeycomb Cereal invisible ink pen....
Paranoia does not solve problems...
[Connection closed by foreign host]
There was once a time when anonymous remailers served a purpose on the net, and where the people using them were as or more likely to contribute something to the online community as any others.
Sadly, I think that time has now passed.
On most of the Usenet groups I frequent (which, of course, is merely the tiniest fraction of those available), the people using anonymous remailers seem to be overwhelmingly: A.) Spammers, B.) Jerks who contribute nothing to the group and who cower behind anonymity for the sole purpose of flaming others free of consequences, and C.) People who not not only pirate intellectual property, but who spam newsgroups with it to show everyone how big their virtual Warezzz penis is. For example, a couple of months ago, someone spammed rec.arts.sf.written with hundreds of badly OCRed SF novels and stories, including some by people who are by no means rich.
Frankly, the people with the most urgent need for legitimate use of anonymous remailers (i.e., those in communist or otherwise oppressive countries where there is no freedom of the press) are the ones who either can't get to them anyway, or whose governments have so much of the system tapped that it would be easy to track them down.
While there are still some legitimate uses for anonymous remailers (Scientology whistle-blowers, for example), the jerks and spammers seem to outweigh legitimate uses about 100 to 1. Thus I see no real cause to mourn their passing. I wish that it were otherwise, but we must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
...when you've got wireless?
Just find your local wide-open corporate or university wireless network, and hack away! Maybe even buy yourself a nice directional antenna... w00t!
And no, it's not a co-incidence that practically all anonymity-enhancing services have been located outside US of A for years now.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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:
The whole cryptographic anonymity area was likely to take a massive hit in the wake of the WTC attack.
Even if ZeroKnowledge had kept going the increased scrutiny and surveillance would render the scheme pointless. Having a FreedomNet account or connecting to the server would get you put on a watch list the minute the NSA found out - and find out they would.
I suspect that the number of hosting facilities willing to run the service servers declined substantially after the WTC attack.
I would not give the Sealand folk much chance of lasting very much longer. For all the riddiculous libberprattle the platform is now inside UK territorial waters and the UK government does not recognise sealand as a state. Since the sealand employees are mainly from the US that would make them illegal workers subject to arrest when they set foot on the mainland.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
IIRC, Safeweb does attempt to clean up JS and other dangerous stuff from pages it displays to you, but it's still a risk.
They do a pretty good job of sanitizing JS, but not perfect. In about an hour, I found a couple ways for a malicious server to compromise anonymity through SafeWeb, using JS. I'll grant that it's a tough job to sanitize all JS, but SafeWeb should provide a way for users to browse without JS. In my opinion, this is the single biggest problem with using SafeWeb.
I sent email to the Safeweb folks about the fundamental "You're using Javascript" problem, and got a really prompt reply from their technical management, which was good, but they fundamentally didn't get it, which bothered me.
Their FAQ indicates they don't get it-- they dismiss the notion that JS is a privacy concern, and discredit those who say it is. However, I think they realize it internally. I know someone who used to work there. He says they get emails complaining about JS every day, but they don't want to do away with their current UI.
As I mentioned, Triangle Boy is really cool - it's a sort of distributed set of volunteer-run anonymizing servers, which keep moving around to prevent blocking services from blocking them...
The concept is old... some people (*cough*) have been doing this since at least 1996. All it takes is an anonymizing proxy script that is released for distribution. I wrote one called CGIProxy, and there are others out there. Triangle Boy has pros and cons compared to these-- it puts the bandwidth load on SafeWeb's machines rather than the volunteer Triangle Boy servers, but then it won't work at all if the SafeWeb server ever has a problem (the other scripts run independently).
Feel free to ask more questions; this particular topic is a specialty of mine.
As a victim of identity theft I can assure you the threat of other people reading your email is no illusion. So far they've managed to charge over $10,000 to our credit cards in three months, and I suspect the sum is that low only because they maxed them out. We know our email is compromised because we got an email confirmation for one of the bogus orders.
Those of you who guard your email address to ward off spam are doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and I pray you never learn what can happen when you truely lose your privacy. If my wife knew I posted here she'd kill me, she's become so paranoid over this.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.