Amazing how people were thinking seriously about privacy even then.
This reminded me a lot of what would appear a few years later as the Freedom network from Zero Knowledge Systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Knowledge_Systems
A big pivot in my life was interviewing and then declining a job there in Montreal in the 90s (over a relationship, what a difference those things make in youth) and I always looked back with the sense that they were another Canadian political sabotage story, like the Avro Arrow well before, or Blackberry much after them. They were right far too soon. Tor was basically the same idea in the end, but sponsored by the US Govt instead of some hackers from Montreal. The deeper story of that company and tech almost 30y later would be interesting to read.
In the 1990's we had Netscape with SSL and Microsoft with PCT. We (the world) really didn't need two protocols to do the same thing. So, we (the IETF) got the Microsoft folks and the Netscape folks to work together to come up with a merged protocol. This resulted in the birth of Transport Layer Security, aka TLS, which is what we use in browsers today...
A big pivot in my life was interviewing and then declining a job there in Montreal in the 90s (over a relationship, what a difference those things make in youth) and I always looked back with the sense that they were another Canadian political sabotage story, like the Avro Arrow well before, or Blackberry much after them. They were right far too soon. Tor was basically the same idea in the end, but sponsored by the US Govt instead of some hackers from Montreal. The deeper story of that company and tech almost 30y later would be interesting to read.