I read with shock and horror this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog about a post by Michael Rossberg, one of the developers of Kismac, that states:
There has not been a lot of time for KisMAC lately. However the motivation for this drastic step lies somewhere different. German laws change and are being adapted for “better” protection against something politicians obviously do not understand. It will become illegal to develop, use or even posses KisMAC in this banana republic (backgound: the change of § 202c StGB).
While I cannot do much about that for now, you probably can. Make copies of KisMAC and its source as long as the website is up! Do further development outside of Germany, even better outside the US and EU! If you are a German resident, you will need to fight for your rights.
The post has also been slashdotted, and drawn 155 comments last time I looked. Kismac is a very popular WiFi sniffer for Mac OS, also boasting key cracking functionality that is not present in other sniffers such as iStumbler.
My first reaction was to contact Geoff, one of the lead Kismac developers, who reassured me that Kismac is far from discontinued or deceased, they are basically relocating their servers (the SVN is already abroad) to a country that is not falling into draconian terms which remind us of unfortunate recent history. Since June 2007, new German law makes it illegal to pretty much do any form of investigation or development in the IT security field, as simply releasing a password cracking tool could land you in jail, and possibly even cause anti-terrorist provisions to be applied to you (anally, one would guess). Some comments from the Phenoelit crew also point in this direction – there is a disbandment towards other countries, and a tacit acknowledgment on the original sites that this is to comply with the new laws.
In Kismac’s particular case, Mick seems to have put the point across in pretty blunt terms, not stating that they are in fact relocating somewhere else, making it seem that the project was dying. I actually believe we will see some pretty neat developments in Kismac real soon…but that’s just a calculated hunch