invites you to ENTER the





It's that time again. Every six months or so system managers start whispering that the emperor's new

Unified Threat Intrusion Detection and Prevention Appliance with Barbed Wire option

is...

...yes, it's just a fancy name for "firewall."

a faster firewall.

a firewall with more capacity for rules.

a faster firewall with a whole new set of rules that make it ever so much better at filtering packets.

but still... a firewall.

You know, a packet filter. Something that looks at packets to determine whether they come from the good guys or the bad guys.

Our information infrastructure is utterly dependent upon the ability to look at a packet stream and tell what it's up to. Where is your money? It's on a bank's disk drive somewhere, protected mostly by a packet filter.

Packet filtering is like what cops do when they stop a car that looks like it might be driven by a drug dealer. That's an easy way to catch the dumbest drug dealers, you know, they ones who advertise what they're up to. The smart ones of course make sure they don't look like drug dealers.

Same way with packets. Packets that come from dumb thieves and vandals advertise what they're up to, leaving only packets from the smart ones, you know, those that can do real damage. Firewalls and their progeny will always be good at catching relatively harmless packets, and as long as they show results, specific blocked intrusions, people will buy them while leaving the door wide open to the hackers who have enough smarts and ambition to disguise what they're up to.

The military has a name for a similar activity: "electronic countermeasures." It's a fancy term for a full employment program for really smart engineers (really smart people can have difficulty getting jobs if they let on that they're smarter than their bosses) who try to intercept the enemy's communications while foiling the enemy's interception of their own communications. Remember the spy-vs-spy stuff in Mad  magazine? Yeah, the countermeasures game goes on forever. No one can possibly get an upper hand. Like I said, full employment.

So anyway, we have this full employment program for firewall vendors but it depends on having a new name for your basic firewall plus extras just about the time when people figure out that the existing name means "firewall" which of course means "packet filter." And since we'll be trying and failing to filter packets until the cows come home our firewall guys will always have work.

Unless.

Unless we - you and I - fail them.

You see, they're engineers, not marketers. They get embarrassed when the adjectives start to fall like rain from the sky.

That's why they hire marketing VPs who hire ad agencies who hire positioning consultants like us who come up with fancy new names.

But now there's a problem. We're exhausted. Depleted. Coming up with "unified threat management appliance"  utterly drained us. This kind of creative writing uses a lot of energy, you see. We need reinforcements. And therein lies your opportunity.

Vendors are desperate and are prepared to make an extraordinary offer to the person who solves their positioning problem. The good stuff has been left for you. Yes, we consultants got paid good money for our efforts BUT did the firewall industry ever have to go

 so far as to offer us a Firewall Rules Referee Bobblehead?

The answer is NO. This uniquely valuable prize is reserved for YOU if you come up with the best synonym for "firewall" to be used for the next six months.

===================================

So. Moment of truth! It's time to give it your best shot! Just enter your fancy new moniker for the trusty old firewall and those engineer dudes will keep getting their paychecks for another six months. AND if you're the winner you'll get an Official Packet Rules Referee Bobblehead to put on top of that trusty firewall, I mean Packet Intruder Detecter Scanner Fixer Snortonlinuxonplainoldpc Fancy Box Thingy.


So go ahead. We need you. Just click the bobblehead below. You'll be glad you did.