A small Australian team, building the network appliance we wanted on our own networks.

I started using computers in the late 1980s, before the world wide web. My first program was in 1990, and I've been writing software ever since, in everything from Assembly to whatever framework happens to have arrived this week. My background is in electronics, the kind that still smells of solder.

For a long stretch of years, the internet felt like a place worth being. It was open. It rewarded curiosity. It was indifferent to who you were.

That changed gradually, and then all at once.

Somewhere along the way, the network we used became a network that used us. Pages loaded slower because they were busy describing us to strangers. Apps quietly assembled portraits of our households. Devices we had paid for began phoning home about how we used them. And the security industry, the one industry that should have pushed back, mostly joined in, inspecting traffic in the name of safety while monetising what it learned.

I have children. They were born around the dot-com years, and my first real worry online was the same one every parent eventually has: what they might stumble into. That worry never left. It just changed shape, from accidental exposure to algorithms designed by people much smarter than me to keep my children scrolling.

When Australia became the first country in the world to legislate a social media ban for under-16s, it didn't feel like an overreach to me. It felt like a quiet admission of something most parents had already sensed.

At the same time, I was watching another generation get picked apart. Friends' parents, careful, capable people who had run businesses and raised families, losing real money to scam texts and phishing emails written with industrial precision.

Two ends of the same problem. Both downstream of an internet that had stopped being designed for the people using it.

WOMBATS Shield is what I built when I decided to stop being annoyed and start being useful.

It is a small piece of hardware that sits on your network and does the work that, if I'm honest, the router industry should have been doing for the last fifteen years. It blocks adult content, scams, trackers, malware domains, and, if you choose, social platforms, at the source, before they reach any device in the house. It runs on real, repairable hardware (Raspberry Pi 5 silicon in a properly engineered enclosure), not a black box. The filter lists are public, so you can read them. Updates are signed. The device is yours.

What it does not do is just as important.

It does not require an account. It does not require a subscription to do its job. It does not send your browsing history to a cloud service for “improvement of our products.” It does not profile your family. It does not depend on a control plane in someone else's data centre. If WOMBATS ceased to exist tomorrow, your Shield would keep working, because it works locally, on hardware you own, with rules you can inspect.

That last point is worth testing against every other product in this category. Most cannot make the claim. Many will not even discuss it.

I'm not trying to reinvent anything. I'm trying to put a small, honest piece of equipment back in the hands of people who never asked to be the product. A device for parents who want their children to grow up with a less hostile internet. For grown children who want their parents to stop receiving fake bank texts. For anyone who remembers what the internet was meant to feel like, and would like a quiet corner of it back.

If that sounds like the device you've been waiting for someone to build, you and I have a lot in common.

If you reserve a Shield in this batch, you'll hear directly from me, not a support portal.

Khalid · Founder, WOMBATS Shield