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ZeroKnowledge's Freedom Server Code Available
hey writes: "The Register reports that
Zero Knowledge's Freedom Network source code is now available." This seems to be part of CodeCon, which is now underway in San Francisco. You can't use the code for commercial gain, but I could see a non-profit network springing up...
OK, it is cool that Zero Knowledge is making this available. But what are the "traditional magic words"? And how would that work, anyway, with PGP? A passphrase usually unlocks only a private key, which, erm, we don't have, as far as I know.
River Phoenix? Open Sesame Street?
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I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Either Bram or Len abused the hosting which was provided to codecon on the basis of "information about CodeCon, text-only" to host large files of non-open-source software. I have removed the files, please get them from a mirror.
Anyone who gets free service and then abuses the terms of service under which that service is provided really has little right to complain when their access is permanently deleted.
Paying customers are certainly welcome to use their full available bandwidth. CodeCon is hosted for free, as it was originally an idea a few of us on OPN were discussing and originally organizing.
Wrong, wrong wrong. What killed Freedom was that it was a horribly designed client application. I sent them money to register it and bought a tee shirt besides because I liked what they were trying to do, but their implementation was simply horrible. Rather than allow you to anonymize HTTP, SMTP, and POP and those alone, they attempted to intercept and proxy with encryption EVERY SINGLE CONNECTION on your machine. Jesus H. Obviously, Freedom broke a number of protocols that it had no clue about, and utterly demolished performance for things that one wouldn't want anonymized, such as SSH connections from your own machines to your own machines.
ZeroKnowledge also made their product unusable by emitting far too many forced updates without even bothering with authentication. You'd think that people who had better be experts in privacy and security would know better, but I guess not. It's bad enough to have your client stop working every four weeks and force you to reinstall, but to force you to go download an unsigned, unauthenticated binary and install it to update the Freedom client was ridiculous. Six weeks after I bought the thing, I knew the company wasn't going to make it because their demo client wouldn't be able to gain a foothold with the proxy design and constant update requirements.
It sucks too, because they came really close. They had smart network coders there and they knew enough about Microsoft network stacks to do some cool things. If they'd have just stuck to what 90% wants and done that well, they'd have gotten the customer base they needed *and* not stepped into the infinite-number-of-protocols developer resource tarpit.