InfoWorld Takes Fresh Look at SafeCentral

I was enormously encouraged to find Authentium SafeCentral front and center on the home page of InfoWorld, next to a subheadline saying "was it (i.e. their recent recent review of SafeCentral) a misunderstanding about what the product actually does?"


Thank you, InfoWorld! And thank you, Roger Grimes - it takes a really big-hearted reviewer to take a second look at a product.

Note: In case you're new to this story, Roger originally tested a number of products for their ability to "shield" users from malware, or "sandbox" their activities. We scored poorly on this - mainly because we didn't stop malware from "entering the sandbox".

As I've explained in my previous blogs since, we don't do that. When we designed SafeCentral, our core objective was not to try and stop malware per se, but allow users to compute safely in the presense of it.

Our objective was to let folks go about their banking, buying, or information sharing safely - even in the presense of the most horrible viruses or spyware. Let me tell you why that concept is so powerful - and revolutionary. But first, an analogy:

Here's how antivirus software works: you are surrounded by bodyguards, highly-trained experts hired to recognize threats and deal with them before they can harm you. But if so much as one bullet skips through... you're dead.

Here's how SafeCentral works: you are invisible. You can surround yourself with bodyguards if you wish, but you don't really need them. Because the bullets have no target. They can't see you, can't have any effect on you. There is no such thing as "the bullet that slips through".

This was the revolutionary idea that myself and my co-patent developers had, and that our engineers and ops team have since matured into a ground-breaking product and service. If you want to try it for yourself free, just head over to www.safecentral.com.

If we have one problem that we need to solve with this product, it's getting the message out about how much this product changes the game. You can't fault Roger Grimes or InfoWorld for not seeing what we're doing if we're not advertising it correctly.

You might think that advertising an easy, invisible, but highly-effective technology that doesn't need updating shouldn't be hard, but advertising anything new is a challenge.

Twenty five years ago, when I was a copywriter at George Patterson Advertising (now Bates) in Adelaide, my first boss used to say "Your first responsibility is to make sure it says 'tuna' on the can". In our case, that means making sure "reverse sandboxing" is part if our messaging to users - and reviewers.

The good news is, based on the discussion I'm seeing around this point, people are starting to "get" what it is we're actually doing. Now we just need to figure out how to broadcast this news on a wider scale.

Of course, front page of InfoWorld is a pretty great start. ;-)