Yoggie CEO Blog

You probably read on our web site that Yoggie Security Systems™ launched its new Open Firewall Pico and Open Firewall SOHO.  This means that we made an SDK and the BSP source code of our Firewall product line available to download from our web site and those developers and hobbyists can buy (very inexpensively $49 and $79) the hardware to develop on. If you are not one of our customers who keep asking for this since we launched our first product, you probably ask yourself “Why are they doing this?” or “Why is a security company opening its platform, are they nuts, hackers will try to break it”.

Well, this is really part of the idea. I mean, not that Yoggie is nuts, but that having hackers breaking into our system, is something that we believe can help, help us to improve our products, and therefore help everyone. Some people may think, “a bunch of naives…” but while we understand that some may use it for a negative purpose, we are all going to benefit from those who will report Yoggie bugs and help us improve the overall security of our products.  Unfortunately we yet cannot open every piece of code, but over time, you should expect more and more to open up.

This is not the only reason for opening our Firewall platform.  Since day one of Yoggie, we are having so many amazing ideas on what can be done with it. So many applications could benefit from a miniature robust hardware platform, running Linux 2.6 and coupled with a Windows PC or Mac computer.  Many of these ideas, could be a great base for new companies, and as success requires focusing on the core expertise, we at Yoggie are forced to not do now, many of the things we can and may want.

What happened internally over the last 3 years at Yoggie, also happened externally with our great loyal customers. They come up with so many ideas of what to do and may challenge us asking to allow them to do it. Now, finally we address this internal and external desire.

Everyone can buy an Open Firewall hardware (Pico or SOHO) and start to develop their own application, share with everyone else their contribution and help us improve our platform, for the benefit of everyone.

BTW, one of the early applications we compiled and loaded into the Yoggie hardware is Asterisk. Many of you know this great digital PBX that can easily serve many IP Phones at home and small offices. In fact, one of our developers loaded it on Open Firewall SOHO and made calls out of it. We do not have it as a project in Yoggie, so I cannot have it loaded in the Yoggie Developer Community repository, however, I am sure that soon, some of you will do. The SOHO version comes with 2 RJ45 sockets, so you can easily connect the digital phone line to the “network” interface, and the IP headsets to the other connection, having a very rich and powerful full digital telephony system at a cost of $79.

Another example I saw, was activating the DNS server (already in the original pack) and use it in a home office to speed up DNS requests (no need to go to the ISP DNS for resolutions).

Think of a Linux box, and this is your new $49 or $79 miniature Linux box. BTW, the SOHO version comes with SD slot, so you can add many GB and mount them for extra storage. What to do with it, maybe a home Web server acting as media server.  You can open ports and forward external HTTP calls to this server only, and you can now let your family and friends access it from the outside.

You can have your personal Mail Server running there and again, have it fetching your email locally from 5 different web mail accounts and forwarding to a single mailbox.

If you have strong network expertise, I am sure you can use it to monitor and maybe manipulate network traffic for different use. You can divert traffic, hunt for specific traffic and implement many network based applications.

I am sure you may have more and better ideas. If you want to propose and share, please feel free to do so, beyond the developer forum, I will publish some here on my blog and will comment back.

That’s for today, please feel free to post your comments here, I will do my best to reply.

Cheers,
Shlomo.

We’re very excited and proud to announce that Gatekeeper Pico has been selected as one of the top 10 gadgets of the year by The Gadget Show Web site. We’re competing against the likes of Apple’s iPhone, Wii Fit and Asus Eee PC. Not a bad group to be a part of..

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