Agnitum Outpost Firewall

» see agnitum.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There was a genre of tiny program in the 2000s whose only job was to get out of your computer without being noticed. They were called leak tests. You ran one, it tried to open a connection by borrowing a process your firewall already trusted or by writing into another program's memory, and if nothing popped up, your firewall had failed. A Czech researcher named David Matousec kept the scoreboard. Outpost sat at or near the top of it for most of a decade.

Agnitum was founded in St. Petersburg in February 1999 by Mikhail Zakhryapin and Alexei Elagin. The first Outpost was built out of the source of an older product called Jammer, and in March 2002 the free version and the Pro version came out together, which is the arrangement that decided everything afterward. The paid one funded the work. The free one is the one that traveled.

What it sold was outbound control. Windows had no firewall running by default until XP Service Pack 2 in 2004, and even after that the built-in one watched what came in and had nothing to say about what went out. Outpost's whole pitch was the other direction: this program on your disk wants to talk to something, do you want to let it. Component Control watched which DLLs a trusted program was loading, and Anti-Leak Control watched for one process driving another, which is why the leak tests kept coming back negative.

The version that reached me and everyone I knew was the free one. Paid security software in Turkey through the 2000s meant whatever came on a magazine cover disc or whatever the shop put on the machine when you bought it, and typing a card number into a St. Petersburg store to license a firewall was a transaction almost no home user here was making. I cannot tell you I ran Outpost for years. I can tell you that the interface it belonged to, the little box asking whether this executable is allowed out, is the most-remembered thing about that decade of Windows, and that answering it wrong was how people learned what was on their own disk.

~ the record ~

~ what the pop-up was for ~

The reason a firewall watched outbound traffic at all was that by the early 2000s the thing on your machine was usually already on your machine. Dialers and keyloggers, and the browser toolbars that phoned home. An inbound firewall stops a stranger reaching in. It does nothing about software you installed yourself that has decided to send something back. Outpost's answer was to make every outbound connection a question, which is a design that only works if the questions are rare enough to read.

The cost of that design is the reason the whole category is gone. Users cannot tell a legitimate update check from an exfiltration, so after a week everybody clicks allow, and a firewall that is always answered yes is a firewall that is off. The industry solved it by moving the decision into a reputation service and away from the person at the keyboard. Outpost was the best product of a generation whose core assumption, that the user should be asked, did not survive.

~ sold for the browser ~

Version 9.3 shipped on 1 December 2015. Eight days later, on 9 December, Yandex bought Agnitum, and the stated reason was not the firewall. Yandex wanted the codebase and the engineers to harden Yandex Browser, so it bought a security company and shut its products rather than running them. Sales stopped that same month. License holders were given until 31 January 2016 to swap their keys for a year of Kaspersky Internet Security, which is a strange thing to hand a customer who bought your product specifically because it was not Kaspersky.

The support site outlived the product by a year, and the last capture of it is the clearest statement anybody at the company ever made about the ending. On 1 February 2017 the front page carried a notice: on 1 March the Agnitum website and support close down, Agnitum quit business and development, Outpost support and updates ended on January 9. The migration deadline had been extended to 28 February. Underneath the notice the download section read that Agnitum had stopped distributing Outpost and it was no longer available. The knowledgebase was still listing how to uninstall it.

~ four hundred and ten ~

Most dead software companies leave a parked domain, a squatter, or a redirect to whoever bought the brand. Agnitum leaves an HTTP status code. Ask agnitum.com for anything today and the server answers 410 Gone, which is the one response in the specification that means this did exist here and it is not coming back, as distinct from 404, which only means not found. Somebody chose that.

The 410 lands you on notanymore.yandex.ru, a page whose Russian title translates as there was a page here. It is a generic Yandex tombstone rather than anything written for this product, and it is served for every address the company retired. For a firewall built on the principle that the machine should tell you plainly what just happened, ending on a correct status code and a sentence in the past tense is the closest thing to an appropriate ending a piece of Windows software has ever gotten.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »