The hottest gadget on Indiegogo is… a router?

The title, which I took the liberty to borrow from the German site MacLife.de, quite nicely captures the pleasant surprise we experienced during the campaign for Turris Omnia. I admit that the amount of collected money came as a bit of a surprise even to us. Just by the way, in our guessing competition among the team members, the most daring guess was USD 560 thousand, almost USD 300 thousand less than was eventually collected. We perceived this campaign only as a test, whether there is any interest in the market. And now we know there is, especially when we remind ourselves that certainly not everyone would contribute to the crowdfunding. Sending money to some of such campaigns means that the person prefers a pig in a poke to the bird in the hand. It already happened many times that a promising-looking project simply wasn’t finished or that the result didn’t live up to the original promises. Another problem is that businesses do not usually purchase through such campaigns, as it is not simple for them in terms of accounting. This also makes the collected amount a great promise for future.

CSIRT teams in 2015

Among CSIRT/CERT teams in Europe and around the world, the Czech Republic is known for a relatively high number of officially established security teams. Operating mainly within Europe, there is the GÉANT organization, which promotes the development and creation of new security teams through its long-established service Trusted Introducer. It is an initiative that aims to facilitate building of trust between security teams of educational and research institutions, operators, providers and government institutions that, within their address space, deal with security incidents, such as botnets, spam, phishing, open resolvers or more sophisticated incidents . Each team faces very similar, if not identical problems and therefore sharing of experience should be taking place to streamline their work. Withholding important information in this environment, on the other hand, does not usually bring any competitive advantage.

Metal or not metal? That is the question!

This Hamletesque question has haunted our team in connection with Omnia for a few months. Turris Omnia was introduced as a home router in a nicely shaped plastic case and for a long time we did not even think of other options. 5 GHz Wi-Fi connection was intended to be provided by three outside antennas and the “older” Wi-Fi at the 2.4 GHz frequency was supposed to be broadcast, sort of obligatorily, with two internal antennas, more or less for backwards compatibility with older devices.