"I want to kill them all," he says. "I want to crush them, because these incumbents are selling stuff that doesn't work, and that annoys me. They're engaged in profiteering. There's nothing wrong with making money, but not when you're selling things that don't work right."

Anyone who has had to run a data network, he says, knows exactly how he feels. That frustration drove him to start his own company, Lok Technology, which now targets the next big wireless market--Wi-Fi and a new wave of WISPs (wireless Internet service providers) that offer Net access over free airwaves and charge people for the ride. The firm's Airlokdevice handles most of the core chores of running a network, signing up new users, checking passwords, routing traffic and, most important of all in this leaky, insecure age, protecting networks from hackers and viruses.

The Airlok's advanced security is where Lok's true ambitions lie. His quixotic quest is to make the entire Internet a secure place to do business. Right now we're not even close, he says. "The Internet today is a house of cards. We've got these viruses taking over machines, causing billions of dollars in damage, and for the most part they are written by amateurs, kids." He frets that one day real experts will wreak havoc. "What if all the banks are shut down because they all run the same infrastructure--Cisco routers and Microsoft Windows? Ultimately it will result in catastrophe."

Never mind that Lok's six-person company has sold only 70 Airlok boxes, assembled by Lok himself and a part-time intern working out of rented warehouse space in Vero Beach, Fla. And never mind that Lok Technology aims for a mere $1 million in sales this year and that more than a dozen venture capitalists have looked at the company without investing. To hear Simon Lok tell it, it's only a matter of time before giants like $22 billion (fiscal 2004 sales)Cisco collapse under the relentless assault of his genius. He's serious. "I'm smarter than those guys," he insists. "I'm going to chop them off at the knees."

Lok has an ego that could fill Carnegie Hall and the technical chops to back it up. At 26 he holds three master's degrees (one in electrical engineering, two in computer science)--and in December he will complete a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction at Columbia University. "I'm an engineer and a scientist, and I've worked in IT--how many people do you know who have done all three?" he says. "That's why I'm different."

Born in Manhattan to immigrant parents (his father fled Communist purges in China in 1958) and raised in Queens, Lok taught himself to program computers as a child and in high school worked as a techie at NASA (news - web sites)'s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.At 16 he entered college at New York's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, graduating at 20 with bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.

An obsessive-compulsive workaholic who puts in 14-hour days, Lok has a penchant for profanity and manages servers wearing a pair of virtual-reality goggles as a computer display. "He's certainly crazy, there's no doubt,"says his best friend, Gabriel Loh, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who met Lok when both attended Cooper Union.

In college Lok freelanced as a consultant, helping dot-coms get up and running. Gradually he became appalled by the shoddy quality of network gear. "It amazed me how little magic and how much pain there was in these expensive machines. Tech managers spend all their time fixing problems caused by companies that make boxes that don't work right. And yet they accept it!"

In 1998 Lok learned that one of his clients was about to spend $70,000 on a pair of Cisco routers to handle the simplest of tasks. "I said, 'Are you crazy?' So I went home and in less than a week I built them two boxes that would do the same job-- for $7,000. That's when I knew it could be easy to develop my own product."

He started Lok Technology in 1999, creating two products for the paranoid--LokMail, for bulletproofing e-mail systems, and LokVault, to safeguard storage networks. Those machines had such impressive armor that they caught the attention of a former director of the National Security Agency, Lieutenant General Kenneth Minihan, who for years had been sounding the alarm about the vulnerabilities of the Internet.

Minihan pored over the Lok boxes and deemed them a generation ahead of anything around; he signed on as an adviser to the company. His pal Stuart Woodward, a telecom consultant, joined Lok Technology in 2002 and now is chief operating officer. But customers weren't interested in Lok's sophisticated security machines. Undaunted, he retrenched and redesigned, aiming at Wi-Fi.

Though only the size of a pizza box, the Airlok 525 contains the guts of a half-dozen machines that WISPs usually buy separately, including a router, a firewall, a storage cache to store Web pages locally for faster call-up, a bandwidth manager, a performance monitor and a computer that handles billing and authentication and authorization of users.

The all-in-one approach wipes out the glitches that arise when WISPs buy a router from Cisco, content cache from Network Appliance, performance monitor from Hewlett-Packard and so on. This mishmash is wasteful--each box requires its own microprocessor, though one could serve all--and needlessly complex, since each box has its own software, requiring WISPs to manage six different systems. Mixed systems are also prone to breakdowns, and troubleshooting is tricky because each vendor blames the others.

Lok's solution:Put everything in one slim box, using one or two AMD chips to power everything, a custom chip for security and unified software with a point-and-click design for easy setup. Lok uses off-the-shelf parts and OpenBSD, a free version of Unix (news - web sites). The smallest Airlok supports up to 300 concurrent users and costs $3,000 versus $20,000 if a WISP buys all the features separately. A larger Airlok, for 5,000 users, costs $20,000 and does the work of seven devices costing $120,000.The biggest Airlok supports 50,000 users and costs $70,000 versus $500,000 or more for equivalent separate devices. (Lok, a BMW fanatic, named his devices the 3, 5 and 7 series, copying the carmaker.)

WIFI-NY, a WISP in New York, uses a midsize 5-series box to run a 25-block broadband wireless network in lower Manhattan; independent filmmakers use it to zip movie clips to one another. SmartWires, a WISP in Miami, uses 3-series Airlok boxes to run wireless networks in shopping malls and apartment buildings. Daniel Ghansah, president, says previously each network required up to seven servers, all performing different functions. "Now I have one box. Itook everything else out--switches, routers, everything. Instead of monitoring all these boxes I just sit down behind one box and find out everything that is going on in my network."

Better yet, Lok's single-box solution is bulletproof, Ghansah says. One apartment network kept going down because the college kids living there were downloading music--and, inadvertently, viruses.The problem stopped when Ghansah installed an Airlok. "Simon's security technology is amazing. I call myself the Maytag repairman now. I don't have much to do,"Ghansah says.

J. Russ Grant, a tech manager at the American Airlines training center in Dallas, ripped out a Cisco router and other gear and put in an Airlok 5-series last year simply because of its advanced security features. The center had been plagued with viruses as up to a thousand visiting clients arrived each week, plugging in their laptops and contaminating the network. The center's Net service would get shut down once or twice a month. "I'd be down for hours. I was spending all my time trying to keep my network alive,"Grant says.

He likes the Airlok because it takes a "tough love" approach; when it spots a virus on a computer, it automatically blocks that machine, "blackholing" the user, and notifies Grant. In 12 months on Airlok his network has never crashed. "The Airlok has the best firewall I have ever seen," says Grant, who believes the product could even change the Web itself."Imagine if Comcast or other ISPs started using Airloks. If someone got a virus, the system would just shut that person down before it could spread. This could make hackers obsolete."

For now Lok has more urgent worries. Ever frugal, he has run through $2.4 million in five years and needs funding. He has applied for patents and is working on what's next, which he won't discuss (something in security is a good guess). "I've thrown the entire book of what I know at this problem," he says. "We can't afford to be using lousy products with no protection anymore. We're all interconnected.If you have a problem, all your neighbors suffer."

For what it's worth, folks at Cisco, with 54%of the market for corporate Wi-Fi webs, say they haven't heard of Lok. And truth be told, Simon Lok probably won't put them out of business. But someday might Cisco make this security wunderkind an offer he can't refuse?It could be good for Cisco--and it wouldn't be so bad for the rest of us, either.