Is ShofarNexus funded by In-Q-Tel or simply a guy in a garage?

Many hi-tech corporations are started with investment funds from In-Q-Tel, or similar entities that are a front for the intelligence community to get their hands into the company and have a less than subtle influence. It is debated how much influence exists on what are now brand names, such as Google and Facebook, but since we are dealing with smoke and mirrors agencies, for us little people it is just conjecture.

ShofarNexus is set before you offering hyper-security and privacy, is this credible?

If ShofarNexus has ties to the intelligence community, they can easily come up with marvelous terms to present themselves as your friend, someone who will embrace ideas like “don’t be evil”, and someone who only has your good in their heart. If the tie exists, there might be some credibility issues.

Consider the videos at the ShofarNexus.com website that show you how you are tracked with your phone and on the web, and the fraud behind things like the blockchain. You might get the impression that those that want to control you, or separate you from your dollars, are not happy with this exposure.

Consider the article “Are TOR holes intentional?” (http://kozlowski.org/2015-01-13) and you might find this exposure idea is a habit.

This exposure effort demonstrates the credibility of ShofarNexus. Do you agree?

When a crowd funding effort is made, or there is a request for others to become involved, you should get to know who is behind the project.

The ShofarNexus crowdfunding effort is not to help you become rich beyond your wildest dreams, but to build an ecosystem of independent small players that you are invited to be a part or to simply fund the development. This sounds like work!

There are stories such as with Hewlett Packard that literally started in a garage. How much these stories are embellished is again just conjecture.

Now consider this garage that was added to a house in the 1990s. In 2017 it was converted into a separate home. This is not the garage where ShofarNexus started, but it is the home and office of the one-man entity that today is ShofarNexus. So we can be clear ShofarNexus has no ties, to In-Q-Tel or the intelligence community, but is literally simply a guy in a garage.

You are indeed being invited to be a part of the ShofarNexus effort, via crowdfunding or business involvement. Now you should ask, is this guy credible? Here is his history. You decide.

Who is the man? It is me, John Kozlowski.

I started my venture into electronics in my early teens during the era when vacuum tubes were still dominant, the late 1960s. For me it was exciting to see two flip flops in one 14 pin DIP using TTL. I think few have that excitement anymore.

However, I was less than enamored with the education system as I wanted to learn. So I completed high school one year early and scooped ice cream for many months until I went into the US Air Force as an escape mechanism.

I got into communications, which I wanted, but it was secure communications, which was new to me, but it would become me. While my peers were using their new found income on beer, I was buying books and parts to build things.

I did attempt a few courses at the University of California in Riverside. I did gain a grasp of FORTRAN, but more importantly I got access to the IBM 360/50 computer with 4 megabytes of core, and that was when core was really tiny magnetic cores.

This was also my introduction to computer hacking. On more than one occasion, the system was brought down by this teenage semi-student.

More importantly this is where I learned about the cryptography equipment of the day, from the KG-13, KW-7, KW-26, KW-37, and KY-3. Not only how they worked, but why they worked.

I worked at the Combat Operations Center at March Air Force Base during the Cold War and two rooms away from the “big screens” used to potentially run World War III.

The mechanical keys to lock the card readers on our crypto equipment were all the same, and I’m pleased to say, I still have one.

The paper cards that were the daily codes were destroyed immediately after use, sometimes by burning them, other times by running them in a blender. And yes, one of these formerly Top Secret cards is still in my possession, but not very usable.

While I knew how to take the system down, I also knew better. But a friend and I, on a quiet evening, did make it appear to some that we went down for about 10 seconds. It caused a delightful panic.

While it quickly became very clear that the Air Force was not for me, I did take an opportunity to spend two years in Europe traveling on an instillation team. My first six months were spent at the Boerfink Bunker during a massive renovation. I developed a reputation of being odd, a bit insubordinate, but the one who was called on to make things work. Several times I was sent to projects that just were not working right to make them work. My greatest joy was while on a multi-week install in Italy, I was tapped to take charge to get everyone home for Christmas. We worked 16 hour days and the guys celebrated Christmas with their families.

I did blunder in my haste and one morning the base commander picked up his special phone only to hear the local radio station. We make mistakes.

I continued to build things, including my first computer with a 256 bytes of memory, and a terminal using an oscilloscope as the display.

While in Germany I picked up the August 1977 issue of Scientific American which had an article describing what we now know as the RSA encryption algorithm. An offer was made to get a copy of the original paper, this one. My interest was strong.

My first “real job” was with Magnavox. I worked on their Agnav system that was used to guide farm equipment through a field long before GPS. More importantly I developed the second generation electronic ignition system for Harley Davidson. This is where I learned about large volume manufacturing. I was the sole developer on the digital side. It was a single chip computer with a masked ROM. We don’t hear about masked ROMs anymore. The first generation cost over $4 and my design only $2, which saved well over $100,000 per year and paid several years of my salary.

Of course when we got the first few samples of our masked device, I kept one.

The itch to be independent was already well developed in me and another gentleman and I did some serious exploring, but nothing came of it.

I did move on to Racal Milgo for about a year and took their IBM compatible terminal and did the software to make it a DEC VT-52 equivalent, which again refined my understanding of communications.

The guy who brought me in had an ulterior motive to connect me into the coin operated video game industry. It worked and I spent another year floundering in that industry. Then came “Crude”.

This was the era of Pac-Man and maze games. My game included a different play field each time, one or two players with growing tails. It was noticed.

Our two man company, Multi-Amusement, got a $25,000 advance, roughly equivalent to $100,000 in 2018, from Taito America. Our agent was Mr. Ray Kassar, who just stepped aside from being chairman of Atari, the fastest growing company in history.

We had a high profile and were doing well. That year the coin operated industry collapsed and with my own errors, we did too.

The name “Multi-Amusement” was a compromise on the “Multi-Computer” idea that I wanted to pursue. Simple computers communicating together, as communications seems to be in my blood.

We restarted as Heritage Systems and went on for about two decades with some noted successes.

The easiest that most people would recognize is this room, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The last generation of CRT based displays in the early 90s used a million dollars of display controllers from Heritage Systems. The hardware design, PC board layout out, and all software was developed by me. I stood on the trading floor after the first close over 3000. It was a few years back.

We also provided display controllers for cattle scales, NASA, the DOD, and a company that had text based vending machine that predated what we now know as Red Box.

Our longest running market was the hosiery industry. Especially with the HSC-5100, a whole lot of socks were knit over the years. Including these with my initials and my wife’s.

Considering this is early 1990s, we were pioneers in using a touch panel, a fiber optic network between machines, and the connection between the main board and peripherals was a design that was similar to but predates the now ubiquitous USB.

The display controller industry was commoditized, and we were gone.

In 1998 ShofarNexus was born, originally called ShofarMedia. Work on it has continued and the design has been highly refined to be simple and reliable.

But there have been issues, and lots of them. It is hard to build a framework to give away and while continuing to eat.

Over time ShofarNexus matured to be not just a program, but the whole operating system. While it runs as a program on a standard OS, it is designed to be the sole program on a device. A program can be very secure, but if the OS hosts another program that isn’t, you have a problem.

ShofarNexus provides secure communications using the Matryoshka protocol. It is not simply encrypted, but fully untraceable. There is no metadata exposed and no evidence when real communications takes place.

ShofarNexus can offer invisible routing, a technique to allow your home or business to communicate on the web, while giving no indication you are connected to the web.

ShofarNexus can offer private domains and private routing, so that no central authority is required or can take you down.

A significant goal is to use ShofarNexus to run a cellphone that does not require your phone to remain in constant contact with local cell towers but still receive calls. To allow your calls to be fully anonymous and untraceable. To be unlike other phones that track your movements and record your every word, but instead allow you to be private. This is a serious and reachable goal. I need help to make it happen.

ShofarNexus is intended to be put in the public domain. When you get the program, the source code is embedded. You have it all. You are free to review it, or use it to build another program with it. I simply ask that you change the name.

ShofarNexus has been funded for several years by being used as the underlying technology for the gas pump portion of RapidRMS to run small convenience stores. Perhaps you have a project that could also use what ShofarNexus has to offer.

What is set before you is full disclosure of a man who has many successes and many failures, but remains the consummate engineer working for privacy and tools to proclaim for all. I offer evidence, and you can now decide if I am trustworthy or a fraud.

Communications privacy is a serious game. For some it is a matter of life and death. For others a matter of control. It is not for the squeamish. I can’t do it alone.

Please consider a modest investment in the crowdfunding effort.

Please consider if you want to be a part.

I’m in this until my last breath. I am also 62 so most of my breaths are probably behind me. The time in now. Please consider it.