Zango Cash Experiments

I created Encrypted Messenger... wait let me back up and give a little history.

My friends and I had been dreaming of how nice it would be to encrypt our Instant Messages.

Around October 2001 or so, I ventured into the contract programmer realm.

On New Years Day a few months later I got a programmer's itch. A programmer's itch is when you are super focused and skip food, sex, sleep, etc. to get whatever it is you want done. This turned into an 11 hour programming session.

Success! It worked pretty well. I release version 1.0 to the world for free with a stipulation that it could only be used for personal use.

A few months later I was contacted by a company that wanted to use it for corporate use.

But of course they wanted a few things added... Thus, the following features were added

• RSA Key Encryption (This means you don't have to really know what your password it will make a random password for you)
• The ability to have several people in one encrypted chat conversation with random keys (that was kinda a pain to get working)
• The ability to send encrypted files through NAT. (Sending files even when you don't have a direct connection to the Internet or your chat buddy)

Word got around...

People came and asked for it to work with Yahoo, AIM, etc..

Yahoo was the most painful to get working. But once I figured out how to connect with the internal Web Browser window the interface with it became the best interaction of all the IM programs I have done it with....

People requested updates and changes were made (when they made sense), I started charging for the software.

Hooray! I was making money off of software that I made.

Then all of the sudden the income stopped. It was like someone just turned it off.

A few days later I got an email from a pirate/software crack group bragging that they had cracked the authentication for Encrypted Messenger.

(It's not like I have a really sophisticated security mechanism, but they wanted to make sure I knew that they were responsible.)

So I tried making a few changes to the code. As soon as I did new cracks would show up...

I went back and forth with a few different updates. But it really didn't matter. I just gave up at that point. I stopped updating the software as much. A friend pointed me to those ad companies that pay you to bundle their software with yours. As much as I detest stuff like that I figured, why not. I'm already being ripped off by people anyways.

So I released a new version that is Ad-Supported with Zango. People can still pay for it to get the non-ad version and people with a real us military email address can still get a key for free. (The US Military thing is a story for another time)

The results with Zango Cash are so-so. I make more than I was before I started using them. I made doubly sure that Zango Cash was easy to remove from people systems. I don't make a killing but it somewhat makes up for the whole piracy thing.

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