Matasano Chargen - Latest Comments in Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

JR — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:48:48 -0000

Congratulations on shipping!

This blog has some of the best (i.e. clear, insightful, grammatically correct, and concise) writing on security issues; please don't let your product focus slow down the blogging. Best wishes for continued success and keep up the great work.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Max Caceres — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 11:18:55 -0000

@PaulM: We will be updating the site with more information very soon, stay tuned!

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

PaulM — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:29:03 -0000

Congratulations on launching Playbook. I noticed on the site that it doesn't list (at least not that I can find) the supported firewall platforms.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Thomas Ptacek — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:07:10 -0000

All I know is, as a result of not taking VC and therefore not having been ousted from the board of directors, I can speak in my role as a company director when I say: if you call us a GRC solution, I will punch you in the nose.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Anton Chuvakin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:00:27 -0000

Wow, this is cool ...

>We just want to solve the core operational problems

Is this, like, the only way to go, which actually passes the common sense test? :-) Is this why this way is so unpopular?

Along the same line, there is got to be some GRC angle with it, isn't there? :-)

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Nate — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:38:36 -0000

Congrats to all on shipping your first product! Looks like it's very useful.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Thomas Ptacek — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:11:22 -0000

This is much, much simpler than Solsoft. We're not even slightly interested in giving you a graphical map of your firewall rules and routing tables. I'm not even totally sold on the idea that you need "rule optimization". The companies we've worked with? They have 10's of thousands of rules. They have a week-long review process for changing one of them. We're not yet crazy enough to suggest they run their rules through a compiler.

There are just a couple key problems we're starting out trying to solve:

1. Too many companies have no "track changes" functionality for their rules. When they do, it's a different regime for each firewall vendor they work with. Most of those regimes suck.

2. If you have 500 firewalls, it's not reasonable to eat 41 hours at 5 minutes per device to make simple changes to all your rules.

3. No system we've seen has reasonable support for documenting rules.

Our answer:

1. A web console that backends all content to Subversion, and still supports command-line svn editing with your favorite editor.

2. A job management system that will push rules to firewalls.

3. A content system built on a solid Wiki engine, which can be integrated into firewall rules, and which also backends in to Subversion.

We didn't take $15MM in VC money. We don't care about our "position" in the "firewall ecology". We don't care about how "defensible" our ideas are. We just want to solve the core operational problems that make firewall management suck, and *then* move on to designing the Rube Goldberg features that nobody uses. I know that sounds backwards. Welcome to the upside-down topsy-turvey world of Matasano!

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Hernan — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:56:14 -0000

Congratulations!, specially to Max but just because I know him better! :).

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Anonymous Coward — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:52:00 -0000

Is this Solsoft all over again? One UI to control many different firewalls? Were they sold for like, $5m?

Please explain - I am really curious?

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

David Mortman — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:16:16 -0000

Congrats! It's awesome to see this finally available...

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

AMZN — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:29:03 -0000

Looks like the Amazon logo upside down.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Tom Watson — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:58:05 -0000

Congratulations! I did like the original name a bit better, but I'm just happy to see the design go live!

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Ted J — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:50:49 -0000

Congrats guys!!!

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Max Caceres — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:23:32 -0000

@Dennis: will do, we are putting together a set of bigger screenshots, we are just excited to announce :-)

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Dennis Cox — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:19:35 -0000

Looks nice - I wish I could see it better, perhaps you could make the images clickable (and with that full screen versions) so that I can see what's on the actual screenshots?

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Kevin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:17:44 -0000

I liked the original name, but since I've already sold my boss on the project, I'm just glad to see this go live.

Re: Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Dino Dai Zovi — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:10:51 -0000

It lives! Congratulations, it looks great.