Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Killed My Kickstarter Campaign
New submitter agizis writes "Alex from Connectify here. I wanted to say thanks to all of you who commented on the Slashdot story about our Kickstarter campaign It was super-educational discussing Switchboard with all of you: you wanted your own servers, and we weren't doing enough to communicate what was so special about Switchboard. Based in a large part on your feedback, we blew up our Kickstarter campaign, and changed almost everything. Thanks, Slashdot. This isn't reddit, but ask me anything."
Hi Alex, thanks for the info. Based on your experience with Kickstarter, do you think a Kickstarter to get a subscription to Slashdot would be successful? I don't seem to be able to disable ads anymore based on my karma, and I'm finding them highly annoying.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Seems now days with fast interwebs and badass servers you don't see many pages getting /.'d which was half the fun of posting websites back in the day. Now we are here to /. your kickstarter projects
Let me get this straight....
You had an idea on Kickstarter. You asked slashdot when they thought. You got tons of "you're doing it wrong"s. Now you're abandoning ship?
Someone wasn't taught to ignore the bullies in grade school. Slashdot posters will hate on everyone's ideas and suggest even stupider ones, just to be funny/trollish. You must be pretty new here.
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.
Did you actually read more than just the title? The first two lines of the summary alone convey that the title is a little tongue-in-cheek and that he's actually appreciative of the feedback from Slashdot because it pointed them in a different (and likely more profitable) direction.
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.
Stop. You're giving people here a feeling of relevance. They might try to fight the RIAA/MPAA in court next, or come up with a new way to find extra-solar planets, or create new physics, or even run for public office.
Who knows what they might do with this new feeling of power? It's dangerous, and you need to stop encouraging this behavior right now!
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thanks guy. Since we can ask anything.
Why is Slashdot so much better than reddit?
Because the stories hit Slashdot days after reddit so we've had plenty of time to think about our sarcastic posts.
I find that a well-tuned bullshit detector blocks Slashvertisements just fine.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think you made the right choice in regards to your kickstarter campaign but at the same time I think we all knew you wouldn't reach your goal and had to rethink your strategy. No one can see a value in a monthly fee for something like this. My problem is you are releasing new software when I would be happy to give you money in exchange for Linux Dispatch. Do you still have the intention to release this for Linux or have you decided to move on to new products?
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.
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.
Thanks for letting us ask you anything.
Can you please tell me if your switches uses quantitative balancing algorithms?
Thanks.
I mean presumably you have to be charging for the severs, and now your asking for people to pay you to write software thats already working, so that you can continue to make money on the software, that eventually you may abandon sometime later if its unprofitable?
Step 1. GPL the client software
Step 2. GPL the server software (which is probably running linux).
Step 3. Offer a optional traffic package
Step 4. Ask for crowd funded money.
But let's get the important question out of the way: would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So, I think I get the point here.
I have multiple ISP's here (I use pfSense for load balancing) but I can't aggregate them for a single connection because I have multiple IP's and unicast doesn't work that way. So the cloud-hosted version would have allowed all my pipes to talk to your endpoint, which would give a single IP to the data-provider and then you could backhaul it over my multiple links. So, a multi-link VPN, right?
So, that sounds like it could be useful in some cases.
Now then, if I'm running my own server, where is it? If it's just here it doesn't do anything new, since I'm back to where I started. So, I can buy the software and then run it on a VPS provider or something?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Why is Slashdot so much better than reddit?
Because CowboyNeal and a large chunk of his Slashdot friends is now on Reddit now looking at cat pictures, leaving Slashdot a much quieter place?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
You are not the 6-fingered man!
Just an FYI for everyone reading the terrible summary.
Switchboard was advertised as a "MAGIC OMG FASTER INNERNETS BECUZ POWER OF TEH CLOUD" thing.
What it actually was:
A VPN client that aggregated all internet-connected links you had, split up packets across all your pipes (you have to have multiple ISPs), and then sent them off to some server they leased which has a fatter pipe, reconstructed your packets from the split up packets, and then routed your traffic to its intended destination, and did the reverse for traffic going to you.
Dave from Connectify here filling in for Alex during a brief meeting. The Switchboard product page is http://www.connectify.me/switchboard/. Please let us know if you have any questions after viewing that page.
Actually, I find this sort of encouraging.
There's a whole raft of companies out there that simply can't let go of The Vision. And absolutely MUST ram The Vision down everyone's throats.
It's rather refreshing to see a company stop, mid-stride, and re-evaluate a product and actually be willing to make a change like this.
To actually, y'know, LISTEN to feedback. Instead of bulling ahead and damn the torpedoes.
Or worse, making some a pointless token gesture.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I hope the slashdot crowd puts their money where their mouth is then. It's a good idea, VPNs are always a hassle to set up and tune, so this would be welcome. I wonder, though, if "normal" people will try out this... On the other side, if you went the cloud route, you'd be the ten thousandth or so VPN provider, with only performance to differentiate the product. And you may even have lost out on performance, despite the channel bonding, if the competitors had servers all over the world.
I think there is hope for both business plans. The personal VPN server market hasn't been cracked yet. There was Hamachi, but it was bought by some company and not much happened. OpenVPN is as hard to set up as ever. NAT and firewalls mean that you need layers of fallback for reliable operation. I would suggest making a Linux version with low system requirements, in addition to the "Enterprise" linux version, because linux users will be overrepresented in the group of people who run always-on systems at home, and it could also run on VPSs. The enterprise VPN market is quite crowded, I can't say anything about how that will go. The hosted VPN market is equally crowded, but there is also a huge demand, partly because of inane geo-IP restrictions on various services. You'd have to sell it on speed, and speed is very much key for things like video on demand. I'm not sure about the value of channel bonding for personal use, as for many people their home connection or even courtesy wi-fi at coffee shps is significantly faster than the mobile connection, so switching to wi-fi when possible should give good speed and less monetary cost. This feature would be brilliant for enterprise systems though.
Let me lick the cheesy poofs off my fingers before I reply...
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"Please enable Javascript to browse this website."
F.U. no.
Forcing potential customers - especially technically-literate potential customers - to allow crap scripting so they can read text is a NonStarter.
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.
Thanks, Chas.
Greetings, Alex.
In the past, I've used Hamachi, Tunngle and failed entirely to set up the Microsoft VPN software (even getting two game clients to interact was two wasted days). Hamachi "just worked". Same with Tunngle. Eventually I gave up on both of those as well even though they worked for my needs. The reason I stopped using them was because I didn't trust either company.
In the process of reinstalling my OS I discovered that even though I had previously uninstalled Hamachi it had left behind an active, registered network connection to their servers--I had to wipe the drive to get rid of it.
The exact same thing happened when I intentionally uninstalled Tunngle as a test. Massive backdoors left wide open on my machine. What I thought was a tunnel was actually a massive hole smashed through my firewall and covered over with a few leaves.
My point is that without the trust, I feel I am better off without those products. I feel the same way about the "cloud". THAT is why everyone wants to run their own servers--they don't trust you.
In some ways it sounds like it's borrowing from the swarm/torrent concept. Smaller amounts of data divided among many sources.
I wonder how it would work out in terms of RIAA copyright bots if you ran a torrent behind this protocol?
I'd mod you up, if I had it. Well put.
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.
and digg blows them all away
rewriting history since 2109
No, your fat makes you look fat.
Aha! I think we have now positively identified Anonymous Coward as Al Bundy.
This space unintentionally left blank.
I took a look at your "What's So Special About Switchboard" link and I thought it was pretty terrible. Oh... it had a lot of good technical explanations, but from a marketing standpoint it pretty much stinks.
People want to know first: "What can this do for me? Then, if they are technically-minded, they will want to know HOW. But what it does NOT do -- which you go to great lengths to explain on that page -- is something they might want to know, but if they do they'll want to know it last.
Your page was really weak on the "what it does for me" and not so good on the "how it does it" part. Very strong on the "what it is not" category.
As I say: just a suggestion. The information there is valuable, I just don't feel it's presented in the best way.