Reactive Software Blog

We promised to update our FileZilla recovery tool a long time ago. Now we’re finally ready to release the new version to the public. Huge amount of testing has been done on both Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 to make sure all passwords from all configurations and all versions are recovered.
What’s new:

• Fully re-written software, no leaks or password file size limitations
• Support of FileZilla 3 (including recovery of proxy passwords)
• Support of proxy passwords in FileZilla 2
• Support of FileZilla Server passwords (only admin password can be retrieved)

Related links:

• FileZilla Password Recovery homepage
• Download Password Recovery for FileZilla

Gandi is in the top5 of the domain sellers worldwide. They have margins slightly above that of the competitors from the top5 but claim that this is compensated by excellent customer service and ideal philosophy (not trying to squeeze every last penny from the customer or fooling the customer in any way). They claim to be ethic too.

I didn’t want to bring this out but the latest post from their blog was the final drop.

That blog post tells us that their customer service is great because they have an on-line form that you can use to submit your issue and wait in the hope of getting it resolved “by one of the support team members, who takes care to answer you as soon as possible“.

GoDaddy charge less for domains. BUT They do have a contact telephone for the customer service.
So how is Gandi better? How can they use better customer service argument to explain higher prices?

Why would you want quick support anyway? Couldn’t you wait several hours?

Not if you’re running a business and the issue is critical to running this business!

We faced this half a year ago. Gandi discovered that some of the domains we have purchased contained other company’s trademark names as part of them. Without any further notification Gandi has disabled all domains that we had in possession, even the ones that didn’t violate anything. Email notification was sent to inform us that violating domains have been disabled.

Alright, I admit it was our fault in the first place that we haven’t properly read the paperwork. But that doesn’t give Gandi the right to disable domains that are not violating anything.

Once I discovered our main website stopped working I started searching for any Gandi contact telephone numbers so that I could resolve this as quickly as possible.
Guess what? Gandi didn’t have any support telephone numbers. Neither had they any working telephone numbers stated in their whois information.
The only option I was left with was the on-line form that Gandi staff is so proud of. It took over 24 hours for Gandi support person to read my support request and fix the non-violating domain.

Our main website was out of service for over 24 hours and we lost at least 20 customers.

After this incident I stopped thinking Gandi is democratic, ethic or fair.
The customer service is also unacceptable. If you can’t afford telephone support you should at least give some mechanism of contacting in urgent situations.

They didn’t offer any excuse or apology and I will be moving my domains to another registrar in the near future.

Feedback on poor Gandi support from other customers:

• http://rocr.xepher.net/weblog/archives/000103.html
• http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/internet-sites/gandi-net/189266/
• http://hostjury.com/reviews/gandi
• http://www.100best-domain-names.com/user-reviews.php?company=60

Update: Gandi feedback form doesn’t display and tells me “You can only provide your feedback via this form one time per week.”. I didn’t give any feedback yet but the page is telling me they’ve already had enough from me this week.

PaltalkScene 9.6 BETA that was released recently introduces couple of new features such as Instant Invite and Welcome Widget.
Since this is a new release we have done some testing with the new version to see if Paltalk Password Recovery can recover passwords for the new version of Paltalk.
I am happy to confirm the our Paltalk password finder tool is recovering Paltalk passwords correctly.

Paltalk Password Recovery helps to recover lost or forgotten Paltalk passwords. It works only if you can login to your account without entering the password (Remember my Password checkbox is ticked).

Links:

• Paltalk Password Recovery homepage
• Download Paltalk Password Recovery

After some testing we confirm that the latest versions of our MSN password recovery tools (Password Recovery for MSN and Password Recovery for Windows Live) also recover MSN passwords and Windows Live ID passwords stored by Windows Live Messenger version 2009.

Related links:

• Download Password Recovery for MSN
• Password Recovery for MSN homepage
• Download Password Recovery for Windows Live

What do you have to do to show YouTube video thumbnail in Google search results?

Just a short blog post to let everyone interested know how to show a thumbnail for your YouTube video in the Google search results (Google Universal Search).

We’ve posted our videos several months back and found them x days later in the Google search results. What seemed strange was that the same search results page had thumbnails next to YouTube entries from other authors. Our entries looked like normal webpage results. Below is a good demonstration of what we saw with our listings:

We were wondering how to get Google to show the thumbnails for our videos too.

After monitoring the listings for 5 months we can confirm that you don’t need to do anything to get Google to show thumbnails for your YouTube videos. This will happen by itself approximately 4 months later (in our case this happened exactly 4 months later).
I think it very much depends on the regular Google index update intervals. New thumbnails might appear only during the major updates to the Google index base.

As for the videos that we did our tests on, we had 5 videos participating in the tests. Each one of them had only 1 backlink from a page with Google PR of 0 (now 4).

Let me know in the comments if you have more info on the topic.

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We would like to wish everyone Merry Christmas and are offering our customers a FREE copy of Password Recovery for MSN! (normal price: $19)
The registration now costs $2.50 (payment processing fee that we incur, zero profit for us). This offer lasts only for two days - Christmas and Boxing Day.

Click here to register your copy for $2.50 or download and try the evaluation version before registering.

We wish our customers Merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!
Reactive Software team.

As previously posted, we have been getting several emails telling us about the bugs in Trillian Password Recovery over the past several months. After re-testing the current version in various environments we have decided to completely re-write the program.

After thorough testing, we’re now ready to make the new version available for download.

What makes our program different?
It’s dead simple to use - just install it and click on the “Recover Password” button. It will do the rest of work for you automatically. No need to look for data files that store your passwords (though ‘external file’ option is available too, just in case you want to decode Trillian password files brought from another computer).
The program has a very sophisticated algorithm for finding the needed data files. If the there’s a Trillian password data file stored somewhere on the system Password Recovery for Trillian will find it.

Finding Trillian passwords has never been easier!

Download Password Recovery for Trillian

P.S. All registered users get the upgrade for free.

Related links:

• Trillian Password Recovery

Related topics: Trillian password unmask tool

Although we’re called Reactive Software, a company that provides reactive solutions (i.e. we clean up the mess after it has already happened to you by recovering the data) we always recommend our customers to take proactive steps to prevent coming to us in the first place by following three important steps:

1. Backup your data
2. Secure your data and your connections
3. Use the password manager and remember only one complex password to all your other passwords (don’t do this if you suffer from amnesia! use paper in that case)

Today I would like to cover the first of the three most important proactive measures to make your life painless: Data Backup.

Note: this is a not a review of data backup products. We will write about one specific solution that we think would fit best any home user (an ideal solution for all devices in the whole house actually).

Live Mesh from the Windows Live team is a “cloud” system that sits on your PC (Mac & Windows Mobile coming soon) in the background and watches the folders that you want to be kept safe (backed up) for any changes. Once you change something (add new document, remove a file, change a document) Live Mesh will automatically synchronise the changes with the remote server. The data is stored on the remote server under your Live Desktop account (under your Windows Live account) so no one else can see your data. You can also add other computers (and folders from them) to your Live Desktop space. Soon, you will be able to add your Windows Mobile and Mac devices.

The beauty of this system is that it’s real fast and easy to set-up the automatic backup on all your machines. The backup is done to a remote server (=to another disk) via a secure connection (encrypted channel) so if any of your machines die together with the disks, the folders that you added to your Live Desktop will remain safe and accessible from your Live Desktop or from other machines where you have Live Mesh client installed.

All you need to do is:

1. Download and install Live Mesh client on all machines from where you want to backup your data
2. Right-click on each folder that you want to be backed up and select “Add folder to your Live Mesh…”

That’s it! The rest will be performed by Live Mesh client upon doing any changes to your folders.

All of this comes for free. Similar backup solution would cost you hundreds of dollars because you would have to purchase not only a good piece of software but might also need a separate disk drive or a storage device to prevent data loss in the likely event of hardware death or accidental data deletion.

Apart from being able to backup your folders to a remote location, Live Mesh also allows you to gain remote access to any of your machines that are on-line from anywhere in the world (you simply sign into you Live Desktop with your Windows Live account). It also allows you to invite your family or friends into you Live Desktop to see and synchronise photos, documents and other data with their computers.

Limitations?
I didn’t notice anything significant that will stop this service being popular. 5 GB space is given.
Because of the 5 GB space limitation, we would recommend this as a backup solution for everything but photos and videos (it is fine for sharing selected photos or videos though).
Photos and videos take huge amount of space and therefore need a different backup solution. We will talk about this in a later blog post.

Now onto real-life examples:
I currently have two machines at home: I use a notebook (EUGENE-HOME in the screenshot above) and my wife uses a desktop (ELENA-HOME). We have a folder with all the family paperwork on the desktop computer (Documents folder). I manage my websites on the laptop (sites folder). I also chose to backup my Favorites and my Firefox Bookmarks (bookmarkbackups folder).

The folders are set to synchronise with the server only (fresh server copy of every file is available at any time). If one of the computers fails, I will synchronise the needed folder from the server to the working machine.

I have tested the system under Windows Vista and Windows XP both in Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers. Although still in Tech Preview mode the system is very stable (never crashed) and works fine on the tested platforms.
The sign-up to the service is free but is available only to some of the countries (US & UK are on the list) during the Tech Preview phase.

If you don’t have a Windows Live account, you can use your existing email address to sign-up for a Windows Live ID (it will be your email address).

Update, 3 Dec’08: The service is still in beta so use this software at your own risk. We have been testing Live Mesh for a while and the software is very stable. The only thing it can’t digest properly at this point is files that get updated extremely often (e.g. Thunderbird mail data files.

Related links:

• Sign-up for Live Mesh
• Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh
• Live Mesh team blog

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What is YouTube Hotspot?

At first, I thought YouTube team has invented something like this but for videos (HeatMaps):

At least the name of the feature gave me a similar hint.
It seems YouTube team has finally released an equivalent to Bounce Rate indicator (available in Google Analytics) but for videos:

I was puzzled by the graph and by the feature. The text at the top doesn’t bring much clarity:
The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. Above the average line, your video is hot: it’s retaining more viewers than average and they may be rewinding to watch that point again. Below the average line, your video’s gone cold: viewers are not rewinding or may be leaving the video faster than the average.

The easier way to understand this, is to understand the Bounce Rate first: it’s a way to measure the drop-out rate for any website. Bounce Rate of 75% means that 75% of people left the website after viewing the single first page on that website.
YouTube HotSpot graph shows the percentage of people that left the video at any given moment of time comparing to other videos (of similar length).

How does this help YouTube authors?

For the majority of the ones who post amateur cellphone “streetracing” videos it doesn’t mean anything.
Some of us who care about the effectiveness of what we do this is a great tool to analyse the user reaction on the video and correct any mistakes to make users watch our video until the end. Correcting mistakes is still very difficult because there is no way to replace the video. If you understand that your video needs to be improved to reduce the drop-out rate, you will have to delete the current video and upload a new version. This can be very negative:

• All references to your old version will be broken (e.g. you old video that is embedded at third-party websites will be broken)
• The old version (older than 2 months) was indexed. You will lose all your precious traffic for at least two months until your new version gets into the Google indexes properly
• Moreover, just like with everything else related to optimization, improving the video takes a lot of testing and means you’re likely to re-upload more than once

Wouldn’t it be great if YouTube had a function to replace the video file without losing the indexed page, the references and links?

By the way, the graph at the beginning of the post is real. What do you think it shows?
I interpret it this way: The video is effective and keeps users engaged until the end of the video. The “below average” chunk at the beginning shows that irrelevant viewers are filtered out right away (they understand this video is not interesting for them and leave).

I am sure there’s more to come on the YouTube Analytics front, so stay tuned!

Related links:

• Hot Spot announcement on Official Google Blog

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Some time ago we wrote about the new feature in Google that allows to see several political videos with automatically generated speech transcripts. I was correct when I said Google is soon to index all sound and videos using the speech recognition technology. Just couple of days ago they announced a new service called GAudi that lets users search for text inside videos. So far, search can only be done within a limited subset of videos but the service is still in the “lab” stage and I am sure there’s more to come (e.g. all videos on the net transcribed and indexed).

Several folks have indicated that the speech recognition algorithms currently used by Google are not unique and can lead to some embarrassing moments BUT this is where I think the recently announced Closed Captions feature of YouTube will come into play.
If you know a little about the insides of the speech recognition and translation algorithms (one can argue they are the same if looked at from machine point of view) you will definitely know that the most advanced algorithms use the learning technique (Google Translation service as an example). This is when two sets of data representing the same thing are fed into the algorithm (e.g. same text in English and Spanish) and the algorithm improves upon itself with every new set of data that it gets based on the learnings from that dataset comparison.
Speech recognition and Closed Captions is exactly what Google needs as two corresponding sets of data that can be used to improve the speech recognition quality!
By providing Closed Captions for your YouTube video you will also help Google to correctly transcribe every single word in your video.
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