We're not into the Internet scene because it's popular. We were part of the Internet community and the communities that eventually became part of the Internet long before there was any such thing as the World Wide Web.

We have been advocating widespread adoption of the Internet and have been working to build it for a long time. We were speaking TCP/IP before search engines, before the Web, before Veronica, before Archie, since the days that you'd publish your email address in ARPA/Internet, UUCP, and BITNET forms.

The Interhack Web (www.interhack.net) had its start in the summer of 1997, originally conceived as a virtual soapbox for a small computing research group. From that time forward, the site grew slowly but regularly into a repository of information about Internet infrastructure, security, and privacy.

We—the designers and builders of the Internet—have a responsibility to build our information infrastructure not only for utility, but for safety and security. We must do absolutely the best job we can. Failures in design and implementation now aren't just an inconvenience; doing a bad job can have a serious and negative impact on the lives of people who use these systems and whose personal information is stored in these systems.

In 1999, we decided that we could have the greatest impact in making the Internet work better for everyone as a for-profit enterprise, using revenue from consulting and software development to continue to fund our research work. We aligned ourselves with a local consultancy and then formed Interhack Corporation in the first quarter of 2000.

By remaining active in research, development, and consulting space, we can maintain a unique "best of both worlds" perspective to provide solutions for our clients: a unit focused on providing solutions to organizations with specific needs backed up by the research and development of a unit of hardcore technologists. Few consultancies can make such a claim.

We're not just a bunch of bozos who are products of the industry; we're part of that tiny group that makes the industry. So why are we here instead of running companies in Silicon Valley? Because we've been working for the Internet before Silicon Valley was about the Internet. The dot-com thing has been done, the tools and techniques have been developed, and we've contributed to that while working at various other places. The challenge now is to make the most of all of that stuff we've developed, which means that we need to help people see how to use it. That's why we're here right now.