The very same thing happened to me. I've involved the CRTC, and I urge you to, as well. Feel free to contact me if you'd like more info.
The CRTC has a handy "submit complaint" web page I used, and that got the ball rolling.
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
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,
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@zeroknowledge.com.
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 prospects in these
markets.
Slashdot Mirror
The very same thing happened to me. I've involved the CRTC, and I urge you to, as well. Feel free to contact me if you'd like more info. The CRTC has a handy "submit complaint" web page I used, and that got the ball rolling.
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: