[prosaic-hacker]

Over twenty years ago I worked for a company who tried to sell Pseudonymity. http://www.zeroknowledge.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20010203195700/http://www.zerokn...)

You got 5 "Nyms" that could be used on a TOR type network. The network was made up of companies that set up exit nodes in exchange service fee. ISPs were a target but anyone who had a public server could sign up.

Some features were free with sign up. Firewall,form filler(early password manager) You could use a credit card to pay for the premium service.(Web Browsing,Secure Email, chat) There was a process to pay for the "nyms" anonymously for the justifiable paranoid. Sort of human to human crypto authentication and digital payment pre-blockchain.

Lasted a few years until venture capital ran out because nobody wanted Pseudonymity. They wanted free services and eventually got anti-Pseudonymity on facebook

[numair]

You worked for one of the greatest companies that failed to survive the dotcom era. Freedom.net (wasn’t that what it was called?) was an absolutely amazing service. The conspiracy theory was that y’all ran out of money and shut down right after 9/11 for all of the reasons someone might expect for a service like yours to mysteriously shut down, but it sounds like that wasn’t the case?

[prosaic-hacker]

Freedom.net was the platform. Zeroknowledge.net was the company. The first big "purge" happened in spring 2001 , not long after the Freedom.net 2.0 release. One morning logins did not work. Big all hands meeting with the message: should you stay or should you go letter at your desk. I have no inside stories of why it happened just my experiences. One of the Hills said to me on hiring "Next year I am going to be a billionaire and you will be a millionaire". 9 months later 100 people were let go in one day. I don't what happen after that but the ownership group and insiders (about 25 people) did pivot to another internetish company. I was at another company during 9/11.