Thanks for asking, this was part of a campaign to sign up technically sophisticated beta testers for our new VPN product. I came to slashdot because of the concentration of such networking experts. The casual, ask me anything, tone was set specifically to disarm the frequent, negative posters who frequently post without contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way. At this moment, I have now signed up 249 people for the Switchboard beta (thank you everyone, we won't let you down). Thanks for your post.

Interesting, thank you. In general I think the trust/privacy issues are bigger here on Slashdot than they are in the rest of the Internet (I submit Facebook's success as evidence). I think the subscription part was a bigger deal to more people. That said you clearly have a valid point, and your stories about those other products are clearly nightmarish. I'm going to keep this in mind going forward. And I get that nothing I say here will make you trust me. So are there standards/trusted 3rd parties, whose seal of approval would make you believe in our security/trustworthiness?

Thanks, Chas.

Thank you for asking. Yes, so in the new form, we're pushing it largely as a personal VPN. It's very easy to setup, and automatically does the same sort of firewall traversal (STUN, TURN, different ports, etc.) that Google Talk or Skype does to get through a firewall. So you can get a VPN server setup without having to deal with port forwarding on your router, or anything like that. We are smart about our channel bonding and protocols. As long as it's possible, we'll use UDP and get much better speeds than you would get with a TCP based solution. It does have the multiple Internet connection stuff going as well. Yes, for that to improve your performance, you have to set up your server somewhere with a very fast Internet connection. There are a lot of situations where this comes up: places where DSL is still common, and where you have a very mobile workforce, a lot of times people have access to both Wi-Fi and 4G or DSL and 4G.

Thank you, good feedback. We're going after the personal VPN first, but I think that eventually we'll be able to return to the cloud server. There certainly were a fair number of people who really wanted it.

Linux will be a supported platform for Switchboard. We did a much better job of building cross platform C++ with an HTML user interface from the ground up. Dispatch's a code has a lot of Windows specific stuff throughout it, the port would have be a new development effort almost from scratch. So I can't really say if Dispatch will really ever happen on other platforms (it could but... not soon, anyways).

I felt like a lot people started off negative, but when I started actually answering, everyone seemed really well behaved. I was happy, I think that maybe more people from the stories should just jump into these conversations. In the end, I didn't have any bad "troll" experiences.

Chocolate.

Ok, what the hell. My father is Evangelos Gizis. He's an academic, who among other things has done stints as the President of Manhattan Community College, President of Hunter College, and Provost of Queens College. He still wishes I had taken school seriously and gotten a PhD.

More and more, I'm coming to think of myself as a guy who takes complex networking technology and tries to make it simple. I'm doing this because I want to give people not only faster internet access, but also free them from the companies that would control what we can do on the Internet connections that we're paying for. Well that's my big vision, mostly I answer emails, and wish I had more time to actually code.

Ha, no really, there were a lot of good points. I thought that the confusion as to what the core technology REALLY did, and the resistance to yet another cloud service/subscription really explained a lot of what I was seeing and hearing on Kickstarter. On Kickstarter, you hear from people who are excited, but very little from the 99% who don't decide to back you, they just wander off if they're not interested. Here on Slashdot, people were a lot more vocal.

I do get how unbelievably negative Slashdot can be. Take the first Slashdot story that ever covered Connectify. ... What did I get 200 comments on Connectify, probably all negative. But I got 20,000 downloads of the software in the 8 hours after the post went up. So it's not obvious from reading the discussion but there actually were 100x as many people who liked the idea, as hated it. (Oh and then we decided that this really could be company).

Sorry, you're right. Here's what changed: Originally this was going to be cloud based service. We'd have servers all over the world, which would aggregate your connections for you to give you faster Internet. But people wanted to run it themselves. And once that happened, we realized that we might as well make it clear that Switchboard is really a VPN. So once you're running your own server, you can start sharing resources off your network with yourself, wherever you are.

Ok, I got a little dramatic in the title of the post. Body is accurate though, I really did get a lot out of the discussion here. People thought it was just a load balancer, and everyone was very wary of yet another subscription. It was real feedback that helped explain a lot about what was going on with the campaign.

Absolutely, that was the main scenario we were thinking about as we designed this. It does a nice job of putting links together so you really can a skype video call from the hotel. Since then we've been amazed to find out how many other scenarios there are: people with 2 DSL lines to the houses, business disaster recovery scenarios, people needing to get video streams into or out of areas where they can only get 3G service... the list keeps growing. But yes, the business traveler was who was in our mind at the start.