Ron Schenone

Acronis 2009 – Upgrade May Be Trial Version Key

Posted by on Oct 31, 2008 | 11 Comments

Yesterday I received an email from reader Don Naphen referencing his experience after he upgrade to Acronis 2009. Don stated:

Hi Ron;
Had quite the experience today.  Called up my Acronis 2009 program, which is their latest version.  Lo and behold, I get a nag screen informing me that the “trial version” has expired!  This was a registered paid for upgrade!  Went to their web page, and they have an option under tech support for a live chat session.  Yes, a nice touch.  Within 1 minute I was talking to a gal who, after seeing my problem directed me to 2 separate Acronis sites.  One explained that for some reason, those who purchased the update were inadvertently given a Trial product key!  LOL.
I was then directed to another site that asked me to input the original key issued, and a new key was immediately generated for me.  Once that was done everything was fine once again. If you wish, I can forward the email from Acronis so that you can share this info with your readers.  The email contains the contents of the chat session BTW, which was another nice touch on their part.
Of course, I’d appreciate it if you edited out my personal info if you decide to post it!  Take care.
Don
Thanks Don for sharing this with us. Hopefully this will assist those who may be experiencing a similar problem.
  • Anonymous

    For all i care passwords length is irrelevant to some degree. I would prefer it if the website defends against brute force password guessing attacks rather then forcing me to use a complex password – the “try 3 times the wrong password and your IP address will get banned for a week” kind of approach. This is kind of very easy to implement and more secure then leaving it to users to come up with secure&complex passwords.

    For online banking websites where high security is a must i would like them to go one step further and use a security token key in addition to a password – passwords can be captured by keylogger software and are not safe for something like this, so a physical key-token generator (like RSA SecurID or eToken, etc) that generates a new key every 30 seconds is a must!

  • http://twitter.com/anarchei Anarchei

    I know some banks already do this. At least my bank, Suncorp, offer it as an option for people who do their banking online.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/David-WN/503715363 David WN

    I’ll let your math buddy go with his 6-character passwords. I’ll stick with the method “whut brung me”. *heh* Takes some time to type my passwords in, unless I use LastPass (and I do, with another of my “overkill” passwords to enable it), but they’re easily remembered.

    Here’s one variation: choose the second or third verse of a song or poem that you’ve memorized. Take the first letter of each word in the verse. Change a few of the letters to symbols according to a method that makes sense to you. Practice typing the password while reciting the verse mentally. Got it? Now, stick a fork in it.

    64-character passwords designed this way are pretty darned secure and easy-peasy to remember. Overkill? Well, sure. Way overkill. For now.

  • http://www.bindermichi.de bindermichi

    A thing I’ve learned over the years is, that a password on a properly secured system is usually 32 characters long.

    Why?

    Because the original password is converted in a 32 character hash value that is stored in a database.

    Result: every password has 32 characters

  • Histrion

    There’s a DIY-hardware solution to remembering your “random” 6-char passwords, something I saw on LifeHacker not long ago: create a cryptkey-card and keep it in your wallet.

    The idea is that the card, which can be printed on a 3×5 notecard or whatever will fit in your wallet, should have indexed rows & columns. For every website that you need a password for, come up with a character pair (for instance, lockergnome could be LG). Find the intersection of row L, column G, and starting with that character, use six characters from the card.

    If this still doesn’t feel sufficiently secure, have some sort of mental mod that you apply to the characters as you use them (for instance, apply rot1 to the first letter or number, rot2 to the second, etc.)

    The only complication with this approach is that some websites insist on periodic password changes.

  • http://twitter.com/jbluther Jared B. Luther

    Come up with a 4 digit number (ex. 1234). Then mix those numbers with the first 3 letters of the site you use that password. (ex. Twitter would be 1t2w3i4 , Google 1g2o3o4 , Facebook 1f2a3c4, etc.) Easy to remember (just remember the number) and its always different so when Sony loses your 1p2s3n4 password, it doesn’t work anywhere else.

  • Anonymous

    Neither of my banks (both leading banks in the UK) support anything except numbers and letters in their passwords. On the one hand, I think this is terrible because I want a more secure password, but on the other hand, I assume there must be some restriction because of the encryption they use which must be better or they wouldn’t use it.

  • http://twitter.com/AlexFoleyTV Alex Foley

    Regardless of the strength of the password, it’s all down to the security of the information on the site you’re using (with exception to local passwords, obviously) I mean, the pentagon has been hacked, Nasa has faced hackers multiple times, Sony, very recently as we’ve all heard, in the end, it’s highly unlikely that this is going to happen to you, however, there’s always that chance, the Internets biggest advantage of being customisable by anyone, is also it’s biggest downfall.

    Be careful.

  • Anonymous

    Thanks everyone for your comments and feedback. It is appreciated.

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  • http://twitter.com/anarchei Anarchei

    I was going to suggest substitutions as well.