| To give you a little bit of background,
BlackICE
came out in August 1999 and Steve Gibson put up his
Shields Up web site in September of the
same year. At the time he glowingly recommended the BlackICE product.
He did an about face when he decided that home computer users needed to
have more control over the applications they ran and decided that he was
going to write a FREE firewall.
In January 2000 ZoneAlarm came out
with their free product and he decided to embrace them instead.
In October 1999, I was working as a project manager for a small payroll
processing company that was trying to write their own payroll processing
software. The upper management didn't have a clue about what goes on in a
software development project. As such, they didn't budget enough money and
said to me "Ben, we can't afford to pay you anymore. We're going to have to
let you go." Well, here I was, a programmer in Fresno, CA, in the middle of
a bunch of grape, peach, nectarine and orange farmers, without a clue
regarding agriculture. It was not a good place to be for a 43 year old
programmer with medical problems and unable to drive a car anymore.
Telecommuting seemed to be the only answer.
I started looking on the Internet for another job. My wife Rita had lost her
job back in July 1999 and she had been looking for quite a while as well.
On Oct 15, 1999 she said to me "Honey, something weird is happening to my
computer". I did some checking and it appeared that someone was hacking into
it. I then did some searching on the net and found Steve Gibson's new
website and his
then very positive article on BlackICE. It seemed like it was just the
ticket. I bought it and installed it and within 5 minutes of installing it,
we knew who the hacker was. Now the question became, "what do we do about
it?"
We called the police to find out if they could do anything as it happened
the person was living in the next town over from us. They came to the house
and they wanted a print out of the information. But, as you know, BlackICE
doesn't do that. They went over to the person's house and talked to him.
After that, we used BlackICE for about a month and I started looking at the
files it generated. I was getting frustrated using MS Excel to look at all
of the log data because it still didn't mean anything. (not to mention the
fact that I hate MS Excel, I am a 'database purist' and feel people should
not use Excel for database work.)
So, in early December 1999, since my job search was very unfruitful, I
decided to start work on a reporting utility that would allow me to get my
name out on the net and provide an example of some of the work of which I
was capable. I hadn't planned on writing any software to sell, I had
initially thought I would just give it away for free. So on December 13,
1999 I put the first version of
ClearICE up on my web site for download. And everyone seemed
to be very pleased with it.
For the next couple of weeks I got tons of email from people asking for
various features, such as the ability to do audible alerts (which early
versions of BlackICE didn't do) and I then decided to try to find a way to
allow users to not only print hard copy reports but to report the attacks to
the attacker's ISP.
Unfortunately, I got the bill for the first month's worth of bandwidth from
my web host (Mindspring) and it went from $60 a month to over $400! With me
not working it was plain that this trend could not continue.
In January 2000, we added a few more features and then started selling
ClearICE for $14.95.
It was doing very well and then I found that the crackers had broken the
registration procedure. They ripped off more than $600,000 worth of the
software. I reworked the registration and put the product back up in March
2000. It's been doing fine ever since.
In July 2000 we came out with
ClearZone for ZoneAlarm and
ClearRoute for
WinRoute Pro. In November
of 2000, after the release of Windows XP, we came out with
XP Firewall Reporter.
The ClearZone
product has never sold well because people don't seem to want to pay for a
product that works alongside a product that is free. Steve Gibson and his
web site didn't help either. You see, people that were buying my reporting
tools were going to his web site and testing their firewalls and then when
they would see the entries in their log files, they would report them to
Steve's ISP, Verio. They threatened to boot Steve off line. Steve
wanted me to change my products so users could not report his IP addresses
and I told him that would not be appropriate as IP addresses can change or
in his case, hackers could take over his site (which has happened a couple
of times) and attack people's computers using his IP addresses. It was an
education problem and not a problem with my tools. I did everything I could
(which is why there is a popup message when you press the Email Event
button, which you can turn off in the options by turning off the "Email
Attack Popup Disable" checkbox in the Operational Settings tab)
Unfortunately, Steve got a bit 'heavy handed' and pretty much killed my
marketing efforts on the ClearZone
product.
In June 2002 we came out with another product called
Secure Address Book but
that allows users to keep their email contact information safe from the
various email worm viruses proliferating over the Internet.
In the past 32 months we have sold about 20,000 copies of
ClearICE and the other
products in more than 90 countries around the world.
Since December 1999, we were the first company to create log analysis
tools for the various personal firewalls on the market it is our commitment
to you, our customers, that keeps our company at the forefront of the
firewall log analysis genre of software. If there are any new features you
would like to see, please be sure to let us know by
dropping us a note.
Rita and I wish to thank everyone for purchasing our products and for
your continued support. God bless you all.
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