FTP Rental
I encountered a pretty disturbing occurrence last night, and I've been checking slashdot.com this morning to see if anyone has commented on it yet.
A year or two back, I was looking for a better FTP program. WS-FTP did the trick, but only, and its clunky interface and lack of support for Windows "special" directories (My Documents, My Pictures, etc) were driving me crazy.
Peck recommended that I check out BitBeamer, which he claimed was leaps and bounds better than just about every other FTP program out there.
He claimed correctly, and within about 24 hours I was a fully paid, registered owner of it (it's a shareware application). It's awesome. The interface is slick, it fully supports drag & drop from the desktop and other applications, it supports file and directory synchronization, and all kinds of other nifty features. Good stuff.
Well, it did anyway.
Last night, when starting it up to transfer an image from my PC, the application kind of stuttered, and then accused my registration of no longer being valid, and claimed I needed to either register or re-enter my registration code.
Not to big a deal, I thought, so I looked up my registration code for it, clicked the button for "Register..." and re-entered it.
"Error contacting BitBeamer server. Check your connection to the internet, or try again later."
Very strange, I thought, especially since my network access was very obviously working for everything else. Being the stubborn, obsessive person I can be sometimes (see Send & Receive button), I re-entered it about 5 times in a row, no easy task since it's one of those registration key entry fields that doesn't remember its previous value, and also which is divided up into four separate fields, preventing a cut and paste from the clipboard. I don't know what software vendors do that except to really piss people off. Maybe it dissuades key cracking, but only if someone were doing it manually, anyway, which seems like a really boring idea, especially for a $20 or $30 program.
Anyway, I kept getting the same message.
Time to check the vendor's FAQ, I thought, or, at worst, send them a support email. So off I went to bitbeamer.com. Except that there's a slight problem with that, which you'll notice if you follow the link. Indeed, this fair company's domain seems to have expired. I don't know if the company itself has gone under, or if it's a domain registration nonpayment issue, or what, but here's the kicker: apparently the application performs an online registration key validation each time it starts up, and seems to hit the key server via a DNS name. So, no more domain name means no more key server access. And no key server, no application startup.
What's worse, even though the application has a 30 day trial period, it's claiming that I'm long past the trial period expiration deadline, which would be correct if I weren't a paid user of the program. Sure, I can poke around in the registry to see if I can reset the expiration date, or I can reinstall the software, and I'll probably end up doing so if this isn't straightened out in a day or two, but I shouldn't have to.
Not to mention, the idea of a piece of desktop software that requires network access to the software vendor before it will even run is sort of oppressive, especially under the circumstances of the software vendor possibly going out of business or some similar condition. Does this mean my registration fee was merely rent on the application for the time that the vendor still agrees with my using it, or is able to confirm my license, and that they can permanently disable my instance of it at will (or even by accident)?
It's infuriating.
* * *
An update: the uninstall log file was corrupted, so uninstallation failed. Reinstallation over the existing copy doesn't reset the trial expiration date value. In order to get this silly thing to work again, I had to manually remove all registry keys, and manually delete the software files. What a pain. I should beat these people up.
A year or two back, I was looking for a better FTP program. WS-FTP did the trick, but only, and its clunky interface and lack of support for Windows "special" directories (My Documents, My Pictures, etc) were driving me crazy.
Peck recommended that I check out BitBeamer, which he claimed was leaps and bounds better than just about every other FTP program out there.
He claimed correctly, and within about 24 hours I was a fully paid, registered owner of it (it's a shareware application). It's awesome. The interface is slick, it fully supports drag & drop from the desktop and other applications, it supports file and directory synchronization, and all kinds of other nifty features. Good stuff.
Well, it did anyway.
Last night, when starting it up to transfer an image from my PC, the application kind of stuttered, and then accused my registration of no longer being valid, and claimed I needed to either register or re-enter my registration code.
Not to big a deal, I thought, so I looked up my registration code for it, clicked the button for "Register..." and re-entered it.
"Error contacting BitBeamer server. Check your connection to the internet, or try again later."
Very strange, I thought, especially since my network access was very obviously working for everything else. Being the stubborn, obsessive person I can be sometimes (see Send & Receive button), I re-entered it about 5 times in a row, no easy task since it's one of those registration key entry fields that doesn't remember its previous value, and also which is divided up into four separate fields, preventing a cut and paste from the clipboard. I don't know what software vendors do that except to really piss people off. Maybe it dissuades key cracking, but only if someone were doing it manually, anyway, which seems like a really boring idea, especially for a $20 or $30 program.
Anyway, I kept getting the same message.
Time to check the vendor's FAQ, I thought, or, at worst, send them a support email. So off I went to bitbeamer.com. Except that there's a slight problem with that, which you'll notice if you follow the link. Indeed, this fair company's domain seems to have expired. I don't know if the company itself has gone under, or if it's a domain registration nonpayment issue, or what, but here's the kicker: apparently the application performs an online registration key validation each time it starts up, and seems to hit the key server via a DNS name. So, no more domain name means no more key server access. And no key server, no application startup.
What's worse, even though the application has a 30 day trial period, it's claiming that I'm long past the trial period expiration deadline, which would be correct if I weren't a paid user of the program. Sure, I can poke around in the registry to see if I can reset the expiration date, or I can reinstall the software, and I'll probably end up doing so if this isn't straightened out in a day or two, but I shouldn't have to.
Not to mention, the idea of a piece of desktop software that requires network access to the software vendor before it will even run is sort of oppressive, especially under the circumstances of the software vendor possibly going out of business or some similar condition. Does this mean my registration fee was merely rent on the application for the time that the vendor still agrees with my using it, or is able to confirm my license, and that they can permanently disable my instance of it at will (or even by accident)?
It's infuriating.
* * *
An update: the uninstall log file was corrupted, so uninstallation failed. Reinstallation over the existing copy doesn't reset the trial expiration date value. In order to get this silly thing to work again, I had to manually remove all registry keys, and manually delete the software files. What a pain. I should beat these people up.