Zero Knowledge

Ever wondered what happened to Zero Knowledge, the 1997 Canadian start-up with a board of advisors featuring Lawrence Lessig and Bruce “Blowfish” Schneier? They lured Mozilla’s Mike Shaver away at the peak of the boom to build ”’Freedom’ technology … provides pseudonyms, encryption, and an anonymizing network to protect privacy online”.

Well, they survived the crash, but only by selling antivirus/firewall/popup-block boredom to customers and privacy policy management packages to business.

Now the happier part, ‘Freedom’ now does provide the encrypted anonymous web surfing service expected, after dropping cross OS support and being renamed to ‘Freedom WebSecure’. $60/month. Check out the ‘rave reviews’.

[/technology] posted at 22:30 #

Loving is not funding

I took this photo here in east Oxford last week. It is a UK government advert “Targeting benefit fraud”. Someone has pasted “Love thy neighbour?” over the top.

Pure insanity.

[/society] posted at 16:38 #

Undesigned

Those of you reading this in an aggregator can completely ignore this.

Those in a browser will have noticed that things are looking a little plainer round here. What started out as an intended transition to CSS, turned into a full blown redesign.

The trickyness of pixel-perfect cross-browser CSS designs push non-designers like me towards simplicity. This is probably a good thing.

[/meta] posted at 16:14 #