Ultimate Corporate Firewall

If you’ve ever dealt with network security (hackers, firewalls, viruses and so on), you know there is one ultimate trump card in an emergency: cut the cord! If a worm is running loose on your network, or a DoS attack is killing your server, sometimes it is just best to unplug from the Internet entirely until the problem is resolved.

Of course in a small network this is easy to do manually. But in a larger network the critical cable might be several floors away, hidden in the back of cluttered wiring closet.

And what if you are not on-site? You may have just gotten notice of the problem via a remote monitoring device on your pager, and nobody is in the office at this hour to unplug it. Seconds can count in emergencies!

For this device, a tiny electrically operated guillotine would be connected to a dedicated phone line. The critical cable is then threaded through the guillotine. When a problem occurs, you call the connected phone, punch in a security code, and the guillotine is “fired” through the cable, severing it. As confirmation on the phone line, a female voice with a French accent would say, “Let them eat cake!”

Obviously, less fanciful versions that didn’t involve a guillotine could be designed for boring corporate types to buy.