Sorry for the delay in responding. I guess I should not be surprised that people assume the worst when it comes to a free program. We've all been burned... Hopefully some additional info will help people understand our business model.
1. We do NOT Phish!
2. The black screen on install: myWIFIzone binds an NDIS driver to your network card so it can put it in promiscuous mode, and send and receive packets. For some reason (known to only Microsoft) this process takes a while to accomplish. If you really don't trust us on this, just close the window, and install the driver manually (
instructions are on our site)
3. Phone Home: myWIFIzone contacts our main server every time it is started (using SSL). It does not send data to our server (other than it's site ID). Our server looks up to see if the site is hotspot enabled - if it is not a hotspot, no further communications with the server occurs. We might send a scroll-up message to the site on start-up announcing new versions or features. This message times out and closes itself in a short time.
4. EMail blocking: myWIFIzone blocks eMail packets from PC's not on its whitelist. Any logon boxes which result from this block originate from your eMail client, not from myWIFIzone.
5. Advertising: we redirect PC's not on the whitelist (intruders only) to our redirect site, which may contain ads - we haven't sold ad space yet so they get a page with links to our site.
6. Our core business is hotspot support which will be available soon.
How it works:
myWIFIzone does not filter packets, it watches for and hijacks session requests. (That is why it does not need to run at the gateway). When an intruder's session is hijacked, a scroll-up message is displayed at the installation PC. If the intruder is trusted (like presumably the user's wife), you can click the message to add her PC to the whitelist. The message times out and closes after 10-15 secs. Maybe we'll make this duration adjustable in future versions. As far as the redirect page, we have the ability to make this site-specific, but we will likely charge a small fee for that.
We'll add this info to our site in the near future.
Meanwhile, thanks for not flaming us too much!