Update: Password Recovery for Trillian

February 28th, 2010

Today is a small update for our Trillian password finder tool called Password Recovery for Trillian.
We have made several Windows Vista and Windows 7 compatibility updates as well as improved the data file search function.
Hopefully there will be another update in the coming weeks tackling the Astra issue.

We’ll keep you posted.

Related links:

A little update for Password Recovery for Google

January 4th, 2010

Our Gmail password recovery tool called Password Recovery for Google has been updated today. This tool recovers lost or forgotten passwords for Gmail accounts from various Google applications such as GTalk, Google Desktop and others (follow the link at the bottom to read more).

We have been getting numerous bug reports about the application crashing after a user has clicked on the Recover Password button.
We have pinpointed and removed the bug that causes this so you can now download the fixed version.

Watch this blog as we will be releasing a major update to Password Recovery for Google in the coming weeks.

Related links:

Paltalk Password Recovery compatible with Paltalk 9.8

December 16th, 2009

It’s a short post to inform our customers that we have successfully tested our recovery tool for Paltalk with the latest version of Paltalk 9.8. The recovery was successful on both Windows XP and Windows 7 systems.

Related links:

Quality Assurance at Reactive Software

October 17th, 2009

On every program page we give the following statement:

We test our products thoroughly on different environments and with different versions of software to deliver the highest possible quality to our customers. Your satisfaction is guaranteed!

This post will explain what this really means in terms of physical work and how we manage to do it.

Planning

We plan for a new set of tests once a new version of the supported program comes out. E.g. when new major version of Trillian comes out, we install it, add several accounts with the passwords and test it with the latest version of Password Recovery for Trillian.

As mentioned in some of the earlier posts we do an out-of-plan investigation if we get the same report twice from the two customers in the same week about the recovery tool failing to recover saved passwords from a program.

Operating systems

Most of the users online still use Windows XP and hence this is the primary operating system we test in. Vista was so unsuccessful that very few people actually use it. As opposed to that, Windows 7, the latest version from Microsoft is very good. Many people like it and plan to migrate to it. Hence the second environment we test in is Windows 7. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are based on the same code and both systems work in the same way. All paths are similar too. This means that if the program passes the tests in Windows 7, it will most likely work in Windows Vista.

In order to facilitate a set of operating systems with clean environments, we use virtualization to host all the operating systems on one machine and have them pure and clean for every new test.
With Sun Virtual Box it’s easy to host and manage everything in one place:

Virtualization makes testing recovery tools a snap

You can either continue with the current state or revert back to the snapshot. Our snapshots have all the latest updates installed.

Software update/issue rectification

If we discover bugs or cases when our software is not finding the passwords that should have been discovered, it is time to research into the reasons and roll-out a new version after fixing.

We’re quite strict on our promise: we do indeed refund money when the password is not found due to the limitation in our software.

Windows Live password recovery tools compatibility in Windows 7

October 16th, 2009

We’ve been getting several reports from our customers stating that Password Recovery for Windows Live is not working despite Windows Live password being saved on their system.

We plan for regular tests to ensure that our recovery software is compatible with the new versions of messengers and operating systems. On occasions of more than one customer report we do an out-of-plan investigation.

Such was the case with Windows Live Messenger. Today we’re happy to confirm that Password Recovery for Windows Live is finding passwords saved on both Windows XP and Windows 7. We tested the latest version of Windows Live Messenger, v 14.0.8089.726.
Passwords were detected and recovered correctly on both XP and Win7.

May we remind you that this is not a hacking tool. Windows Live password recovery tool that we offer only recovers passwords saved on your local system. There is a simple check: if you are able to login with your messenger automatically without entering your password then you are guaranteed to be able to recover it.

The above compatibility statement also applies to our MSN password recovery tool called Password Recovery for MSN.

Related links:

Update: Password Recovery for FileZilla

April 9th, 2009

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:

Real customer service experience at Gandi

March 13th, 2009

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:

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.

Paltalk Password Recovery is compatible with PaltalkScene 9.6

February 3rd, 2009

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:

MSN password recovery tools compatible with WLM 2009

January 2nd, 2009

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:

How to show YouTube video thumbnail in Google search results

December 30th, 2008

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:
YouTube thumbnails in google search results

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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