Sygate Personal Firewall

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

~ the last words ~

A box appears in the corner of the screen naming an executable you did not knowingly start, and asks whether it should be allowed to reach the internet. You get two buttons and no information. Sygate Personal Firewall asked that question several times a day for about five years, and the honest answer, for most of the people looking at it, was that they had no idea.

The company took its name from a different product. In June 1998 sygate.com was advertising software that let an unlimited number of networked computers share one modem without a proxy, running in the tray on Windows 95, which was a real problem in a house with one phone line. The company behind it was Sybergen Networks of Fremont, California, and it eventually renamed itself after the thing people had heard of. By late 2000 the site was describing itself as a distributed firewall and internet connection sharing company, which is the entire pivot sitting in one line of markup.

The pivot made sense. Once a machine is sharing a connection it is also standing between other machines and the network, and the code that routes packets is most of the code that filters them. Windows XP arrived in 2001 with a firewall switched off by default, and Service Pack 2 turned it on in August 2004 but only inspected what was coming in. Outbound control stayed with the third-party products, and outbound control was the whole pitch: it told you when something already running on your computer had started talking.

By the time i had a connection that stayed up all day, Sygate had been discontinued for months. Turkish home broadband reached me around 2006, and before that a session was a dial-up call with a fresh address every time and an accidental kind of shelter in the fact that the machine was unreachable most of the day. This whole category of software was answering a question that only gets urgent once the computer is sitting there online while you are asleep.

~ the record ~

~ the question it kept asking ~

Outbound filtering moved the decision onto the person at the keyboard, which was both the point and the flaw. Answering a prompt correctly required knowing whether svchost.exe had a legitimate reason to open a connection at that particular moment. Most people clicked allow and stopped reading them. A smaller number read every single one and learned more about their own machine in six months than the documentation ever taught anyone.

A small hobby industry grew up around testing these products, with tiny programs written for no purpose except to demonstrate that a given firewall could be walked past by a process pretending to be something else. Sygate did well in that culture. It also had a free version that was not deliberately crippled, which is why it kept turning up in recommendations from people who did not otherwise recommend anything.

~ what symantec bought ~

Symantec announced the acquisition on 16 August 2005 and closed it on 11 October. What it wanted sat on the enterprise side: endpoint compliance and network access control, the machinery for checking that a laptop is patched before letting it onto a corporate network. That technology went into what became Symantec Endpoint Protection and is still in the product line under a different owner today.

The consumer firewall was the awkward part of the purchase, because Symantec already sold one inside Norton Internet Security and had no intention of giving a competitor away for free. On 30 November 2005 the free version and Sygate Personal Firewall Pro were both discontinued. A company spokesperson explained that upon review, the decision was made to offer special pricing and incentives to move customers to the Norton family. Pro license holders were offered a discount on the product that had just replaced theirs.

~ what was left running ~

The reaction was not gracious. Forums filled with people accusing Symantec of buying a rival in order to switch it off, which the timing supports even if the enterprise business was the actual reason anybody wrote a check. The last builds kept circulating on download mirrors for years afterward, unsupported and unpatched, still being recommended by people who had not heard.

They stopped working eventually, the way an unmaintained kernel-level driver always does, somewhere around the move to 64-bit Windows. sygate.com is a parked domain with a price on it now. What is left is the shape of the thing: a piece of consumer software whose main function was to interrupt you and make you accountable for a decision, which is not a design anybody ships to consumers anymore.

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