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.