Yoggie PICO Personal Mobile Security Computer
Taking security out of the hands of the average user is a good way of increasing system security. That's my opinion on the matter, the greatest security risk is most of the time the human sitting in front of the computer. The Yoggie Pico is a security device with 13 security applications in USB format that runs Linux and handles all network traffic of the computer.
The benefits of this solution are twofold. First it frees system resources of the computer because the on board processor is handling those applications. All the necessary files to run are stored in read only memory and transferred to the system memory at system boot which means that any possible changes are reset when booting the system for the next time.
A licensed included version of Kaspersky anti-virus is keeping the system virus free while other systems protect the computer against various threats like IP spoofing, DNS attacks, Phishing and Spyware. Add to that Parental Controls and Web Filtering and you got a complete security solution for your PC or laptop.
All of this sounds really nice but what happens if something goes wrong ? What if the web filter is filtering a website that the user wants to visit ? Does he then have to configure the web filter in Linux ? What about the firewall ? That would be a major concern for me.
Yoggie Pico Personal is currently available at Amazon for $127.49, the business edition adds a secure VPN and sells for $139.99 at Amazon. The license has to be renewed each year which costs $30 for the personal and $40 for the business edition.
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Hi Martin,
I am both an avid reader (You might remember quoting your blog quite a few times at my own personal blog http://avidardik.com/) as well as a Yoggie employee – I was delighted to have your blog posting regarding the Gatekeeper Pico!
I would like to provide answers for your questions regarding controlling, configuring and monitoring the Gatekeeper device:
While the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pico is indeed actually a computer running Linux – The user does NOT have access to the actual Linux console whatsoever.
There is a full and rich Web-based interface to monitor and configure your device.
The Web-based console enables you to browse security logs and reports, configure various settings, open firewall pots, white list Web sites and so on.
(For the more technical readers – There is actually a Web server running inside the Gatekeeper Pico mini-computer that you can access with your regular PC Web browser.)