eEye Digital Security

I had to reinstall the OS due to a drive failure.  I chose to reinstall rather than go back to an Acronis Image due to a number of reasons no one would be interested in.

I reinstalled Blink from a download I had last July.  It told me my licence key had already been used as it tried to re-register me.  I uninstalled Blink.  Downloaded a fresh copy which gave me a new serial number.  Trying that gave me a server error and told me to contact licensing@eeye.com.  I sent them an email but no response.  I called this morning to sales but they told me Blink personal people have no support other than this forum.  I searched here and found a bunch of people having the same or very similar issues but no resolution.

Blink.... you guys listening?  Help.  Heavens, I have only the XP provided firewall and no antivirus protection.  I need something now!  I can't believe you guys have such a complicated licensing system.  At the LEAST you should allow anyone to use your product for a few days or a week no questions asked until an issue can be resolved.  The way you have it someone gets left with no protection at all.  I'm sorry guys but no matter HOW good your product is, you are worthless if you can leave someone unprotected completely.  Particularly someone who has done everything within reason correctly.  You need to make a change here and you need to get back to me fast.

Our licensing is indeed not best suited for users who wipe their machines and reinstall.

In spite of the long post, I see no information which to help us decide what we need to do next. Can you send us screenshots of the error as well as your order email?

Please send them at lnicula@eeye.com and I will send them to the appropriate department.

Thank you!

Sent.

Eeye sent me an email early yesterday evening telling me that I have been reset to 2 active licences and that worked fine.  Thank You.

I would like to document how to handle Blink Personal licenses for myself and anyone else who might search these archives.  As I mentioned before, I did do some searching and found others who had similar problems but no real explanations as to how licensing works or what I needed to do to remedy my situation.  So I have some questions still in my mind.  I'm working but not sure exactly why.

1,  I have a 3 station license and am only using two.  The issue I had in this post was with the first PC I installed Blink on, and I had saved that key in Keepass Password Safe.  I had only kept one key thinking that was all I needed.  I didn't realize when I set up the second computer that I may have gotten a second and different key.  Since I didn't save that information on my other PC how can I find out what key that one is using or are they both actually the same key?  I've not had to do anything with the other PC but I might one day.

2.  When you do something such as wipe and do a clean install, do you go into blink help, license management and do a 'transfer' function.  Then when you install a fresh copy of the OS and Blink, do you use the same key or get a new one?

3.  How does a person handle the situation when a sudden failure prevents you from going into Blink and doing a transfer before hand?

4.  Is there any documentation anywhere telling us how to manage our keys properly?  In most cases I have never had an issue.  I was usually able to go back and restore an acronis image when I needed to.  The second computer I spoke of is our kids PC and I regularly restore that one so it seems an image restore works fine with licensing.  If I could get a complete picture of how this works I'm thinking I could avoid a 20 hour delay (or more I suppose on weekends and holidays) in getting blink running.

Thank you

John

     Yes I will agree with you, unless you have no ability to remove your license (because of serious system crashes, etc) then using Blink's built in license transfer feature is your choice of action, HOWEVER, unless you dig around in Blink everyday trying to learn everything you can about it, you probably will not come across this feature.

     I made a recommendation to eEye, via their main webpage feedback form, that they should totally scrap the 3 license pack and only sell single licenses.  This would "hopefully" allow users to use a single license on a single system at a time, thus if they put the wrong one on the wrong system, it would be an obvious mistake.

     Finally, Blink did start out as an Enterprise security product, so I can see why licenses and their usage rules is picky.

azpilot:

4.  Is there any documentation anywhere telling us how to manage our keys properly?  In most cases I have never had an issue.  I was usually able to go back and restore an acronis image when I needed to.  The second computer I spoke of is our kids PC and I regularly restore that one so it seems an image restore works fine with licensing.  If I could get a complete picture of how this works I'm thinking I could avoid a 20 hour delay (or more I suppose on weekends and holidays) in getting blink running.

Documentation wise, No, I don't think there is.  I can however, submit that recommendation to eEye via my ticket system being a Blink Professional user.  I have asked them to add other things to the documentation in the past by using this method.  You have done really all you can do, install your OS from scratch, update it, add Blink, and then image it.  This pretty much is the easiest (one time headache) solution for using Blink AND recovering from infections.  I do not recommend installing any applications until after I make an image, simply because of the possibility that the next time you use that image, you would have to un-install and then re-install an up-to-date version of the software again (i.e. like you might have to do with Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash, Sun's JRE, etc).

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Yes this has happened to me too. For something as petty as resizing my partition, that had taken me by surprise. That was a very long time ago 9/2007.

I was recommending this security product to my residential customers. Now I'm paying the price. I had to restore this customers computer to an earlier image it was so badly infested with spyware (It was the users fault not blink) couldn't do anything on it. Well I have to get it back to them and still no word from the license email I sent two days ago and with the weekend  here I doubt any reply will come until next week sometime.

I'll be footing the bill to replace blink with something else. Live and Learn.

I'd never recommend this to my commercial accounts, It breaks to easy. It's a damn shame, I love this program.

I will not be renewing All the licenses bought.

I am sorry to hear you had these kind of issues.

We listened to what customers had to say and we recently changed the way the license is enforced and it should not get validated when hardware changes (unless you reinstall Windows).

lnicula:

We listened to what customers had to say and we recently changed the way the license is enforced and it should not get validated when hardware changes (unless you reinstall Windows).

How is this to work for Enterprise customers that have one base image (that they use on all of their systems when they have to re-image them)?  It would be a nightmare for a System Administrator if they could not do this...considering I have had to deal with such issues myself when it comes to the military.  Unfortunately, the military and a lot of DOD still uses McAfee and Symantec products mostly (This is UNFORTUNATE, because they are crap and could not defend themselves from a diseased wet paper bag, yet alone a zero-day :(  ) ... for example this test that was done proves it (funny that Blink was NOT included in this!):  http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9117042 .  BUT they have good licensing systems that account for this type of enterprise/business environment usage.

     Finally, is there something different when it comes to the Personal Edition and Professional Edition of Blink when concerned with license usage?  The reason I ask, I have one base image of Windows created (that does not have Blink installed on it) and I have restored my system from it many times.  After that I re-intstall Blink Professional and not once did it complain about my license (even if I did not choose to use the "Transfer License" feature in Blink before wiping my system).  I have had to Re-register Blink, but did not have any issues.  Yet, all of these Personal Edition users seem to be bashing their heads in the wall because something that is different.  Is there something that is different (in terms of handling licenses at eEye) when it comes to the different editions of Blink?  Is your Personal Edition of Blink using a different licensing server or system at eEye?

     I hate to see users quit using this product from such a factor, but so far the only ones that seem to get rid of Blink are doing it for that reason only.  Something definitely needs to be done if you want to continue to grow.

Mark56:

It's a damn shame, I love this program.

YES I love it too and that is why every chance I get that I can I will respond to reviews that have been done on Blink, pointing them to the free-version and where to get it.