Yoggie Gatekeeper PICO
By Bruce Wildstein

Many of us may remember the early days of the Internet when life was simple.

You had email, some simple web sites, and cruising them was a relatively uneventful pastime. Over the years, things became much more complicated, and today there are a myriad of dangers one may encounter when navigating just about any area of the virtual world. Numerous software solutions have become available to help keep evil threats away from our computers. Now a company called Yoggie has devised a rather ingenious solution that aims to foil all these threats with one simple device: the Gatekeeper PICO. Billed as delivering "Pentagon Level Protection In The Palm of Your Hand", this tiny gizmo looks like just another USB memory stick, but actually contains a full-blown micro-computer with its own operating system. A total of twelve types of protection are supposed to be enforced by the PICO, which include a firewall, anti-virus, anti-phishing, anti-spyware, intrusion detection, anti-spam, parental control, and some other more sophisticated types of defense.

Installing the PICO is straightforward. Yoggie states the user should first remove from their PC any security software such as anti-virus or a firewall. Then you just plug the PICO into a spare USB slot on your notebook or desktop PC and insert the Windows XP/Vista software CD. Three blue LED's on the PICO will flash when it's active. The software installed with no problems and there was a quick registration process. It should be noted that the anti-virus used by Yoggie is from the well-regarded Kaspersky Labs and you'll receive a free first year's subscription. With the PICO then up and running, I wanted to investigate any controls or reports that were available. Yoggie has an icon running in the system tray, and right clicking it launches Windows Internet Explorer, which allows you to access the Management Console. After logging in, a colorful screen appears with round status indicators that show your computer's risk level and any significant events that have been logged. Clicking on another button gives access to the "Reports" section. These reports give numerical results and can be viewed as two or three-dimensional graphs while system and security logs may also be viewed from this page. There is a "Settings" control which allows one to set the level of protection desired to low, medium, or high(default is medium). This page also has settings for web filtering so that adult, chat, and other types of web sites might be blocked. Other more sophisticated controls are also available for blocking of certain types of Internet protocols, limiting file download size, and PC port access. For most people however, the default settings for these controls will suffice. The last button on the page, "Support," gives system information that includes the date and time of the last anti-virus update, CPU usage and temperature. There is also a section with some diagnostics for the technically inclined.

So how did the Yoggie Gatekeeper PICO perform? Basically, it's transparent, you don't know that it's working behind the scenes and it doesn't annoy you with pop-up messages. The anti-virus software is updated automatically as needed. At times, it seemed like there was some slowdown in performance while the PICO was working, although this may depend on your own system and type of Internet connection you have. On the other hand, Yoggie points out that using the PICO means you don't need any other firewall, anti-virus or spyware/adware programs running on your PC using up valuable resources. The PICO updates its own software when needed, and its operating system is protected from hacking by its "dual flash" memory. The bottom line is that the PICO is delivering a very wide and comprehensive range of computer protection, and all in a tiny package. Perhaps this is the future of Internet security, and you would do well to check out the Gatekeeper PICO for yourself.