Corporate firewalls are designed to protect a company's internal network from outside intruders. We have a firewall set up in our own office network to do just that. So far, Civil Netizen has been limited to direct connections between the sender and receivers. For a lot of users behind firewalls that block such connections, our software has not worked for them.

Starting with the next release, Civil Engines will offer a secure "web bridge" service to all our users for free. This service is similar to those provided by web conferencing vendors such as WebEx or Citrix Online that allow programs on the users' PCs to connect out via a standard HTTPS connection to the vendor's servers. One the users are connected to the vendor's servers, then connection between users can be established by routing the traffic between the vendor's servers. Instant messenging (IM) services work in a similar way.

In our case, our servers are running a Linux-based program called Civil Servant, which we have developed concurrently with Civil Netizen from the start. This Civil Servant software acts as a "mediator" to help two users connect in the most efficient way possible. For users behind regular home routers, this is usually done through a direct peer-to-peer connection. (Our secret sauce is that our networking stack can work through most NATs using a cocktail of NAT traversal techniques.) If one or both of the users are behind restrictive firewalls, then Civil Servant will serve as a secure web bridge. The bottom line: We will achieve close to 100% connection success for our users.

We had initially held off providing this service because we wanted to really push the limits of our peer-to-peer networking stack as far as we could. Now that we have achieved over 80% connection success using only P2P and LAN transfer capabilities, it is time for us to pay back the remaining 20% users for their patience with this new firewall-friendly enhancement. We plan to enable this feature in Beta Release 5. (Those of you with Beta Release 4 installed should get an automatic software update notification when Beta 5 is out.)

Please continue to watch this space for new feature announcements. More is on the way before the end of the month.