NirBlog

A week ago, I released a new utility named ‘WebBrowserPassView‘ that can recover lost web site passwords for the following Web browsers: Internet Explorer (Version 4.0 – 8.0), Mozilla Firefox (All Versions), Google Chrome, and Opera.
This tool is somewhat a combination of my other password recovery tools: IE PassView, PasswordFox, ChromePass, and OperaPassView.
However, some of the advanced features available in the other tools, like master password support and reading the passwords from external drive, are still not available in the merged WebBrowserPassView utility.

The advanced features will  gradually be added in future versions of WebBrowserPassView.

WebBrowserPassView

The new versions of WhoisThisDomain and DNSDataView utilities allow you to type domain names which contain non-English characters (internationalized domain names).
when you type a domain with non-English characters, it automatically converted to its Ascii form (Which looks like xn--aaaaaa.com) before sending it to the Whois/DNS server.

However, be aware that I currently use the internal IDN support provided by Windows operating system, which was added starting from Windows XP with service pack 2,
so this new feature may not work on systems prior to XP/SP2.
You can check whether your Windows OS supports IDN by searching for normaliz.dll inside your system32 directory.
If this file exists, it means that your system has IDN support.

Most modern routers allow you to backup the configuration of the router into a file, and then restore the configuration from the file when it’s needed.
The backup file of the router usually contains important data like your ISP user name/password, the login password of the router, and wireless network keys.

If you lost your ISP password, your wireless network keys, or the login password of your router, but you have the backup file of the router configuration, RouterPassView utility might help you to recover your lost password.

However, due to large amount of router models available in the market, RouterPassView cannot support all routers. Currently RouterPassView supports a limited set of router models, and support for more routers will be gradually added in future versions.

For more information about the RouterPassView utility, click here.

RouterPassView

As you probably know, today is April 1st (April Fools’ Day), which is a day for hoaxes and practical jokes in many countries around the world.

As a popular Web site which receive dozens of email messages every day, I sometimes get very weird and somewhat funny messages that look like a  good hoax, although the people that sent these message didn’t have any intention to spoof me, and they really believed in what they wrote.

Today is a great day to publish the most weird and funny message that I received into my mailbox in the last few years.  Due to my commitment to the privacy of anyone that send me a private message, I cannot publish the original messages, so I’ll only publish the general content of these messages.

So here’s the summary for the weird messages:

1. People that request a refund for my freeware utilities:  Yes, it’s hard to believe, but even when I provide my utilities for free, I still get messages from people that ask me to issue a refund for the money that they never paid me. A typical message look like this: “I paid for your software and it doesn’t work for me, I want to know how to get a refund.”
   If you wonder how it’s possible that people who never paid me request to get a refund, here’s the answer. In fact, there are 2 kind of cases:
   • People who bought a product which is very similar to one of my utilities, and mistakenly think that my utility is the one that they paid for.
   • People who “bought” my software from a scam Web site that illegally sell my utilities.  These kind of scam Web sites, like MsnPass.Info that I also published in my Blog,   promise the users things that are not really accurate, like “100% password recovery for your hotmail account”, and request the user to pay for it. After the user pays, he redirected to download my software and find out that my software doesn’t work as promised.  After that, the user find my contact email in the help file of my software, and send me a message that ask for a refund because the software doesn’t work, without understanding that he simply paid for a scam Web site, and I’m not the right address for a refund….
2. People who blame me for distributing Trojans and Viruses:  As you may already know,  most Antivirus programs show false Virus/Trojan alerts for my utilities, especially for the utilities that extract passwords or other sensitive data from the operating system.
   Because I already warn about false virus alerts in my Web site and also posted about the problem in my Blog, most people understand that the Virus alerts are false and my software is clean from any Virus or Trojan.
   However, in rare cases there are people who believe  that the Virus alert is real, and blame me for creating evil Web site that installed Trojans on their machine.

   I had a very extreme case of someone that blamed me  putting a backdoor inside my ‘ProduKey’ utility that allowed an hacker to take over his computer. He wrote me around 4 emails of science fiction stories where NirSoft is the most evil thing in the world.  From privacy reasons, I cannot publish these email messages, but this guy also chose to publish some of his Anti-NirSoft propaganda in a public forum, which you can find in the following links:

   http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/1229027114
   http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/win2000/1225682351

3. People who complain that my utilities are not freeware and require them to pay:  Yes, I got a few messages in the past that looked like this: “Your Web site is a scam, it says that the software is free, but when I download the software, I get a message that the trial period expired and ask me to pay for the software.”
   Do you wonder how is it possible ? Here’s the answer:
   There are people that install and use shareware zip products, like WinRar or Winzip as their default software to open zip files. When they download my utilities in zip file,  WinRar or Winzip, which is the default software to open zip file in their computer, show a message that their trial period expired. Some people that see this message, think that my software is the one that show the expired message…
4. People who complain that my Web site is down for many days: Sometimes I get a message that looks like “Your Web site is down for many days.  Are you going to bring your Web site back online,  or you closed your Web site completely ?”.  The people that sent this kind of message simply couldn’t access my Web site because they had a firewall or other security related software that blocked my Web site.
5. People who complain that I don’t have any download link on my Web site: All my utilities pages provide a download link in the bottom of the page, but sometimes there are visitors that cannot figure out that they have to scroll down the page in order to reach the download link. So I  get email messages that looks like “I browse into your Web site and I found many interesting utilities, but you don’t provide any link to download them. Is there  any way to download your software or your Web site is just a scam ?”
6. Call me 12341235 urgently, I need help in using your program: Some people think that if I provide my utilities for free, I also have to call them (and pay for the phone expenses too ?)  and personally explain them how to use my software, and most of them also write that it’s very urgent.
7. Please send me the password for myemail@email.com, it’s very urgent ! : Some people think that I’m a magician or a super-hacker that  can find the password of any email account, so they ask me to send them the password of the specified email urgently. Some of them ask me to send the lost password of their own email account.
   Some others, send me requests that looks like this one: “I think that my fiance is cheating on me and I need to check her email in order to get proofs.  Please send me the password for her email account as soon as possible. The email address is myemail@email.com”.
8. People who complain that the zip file disappear after download: Sometimes I get message like “You have a bug in your software – when I try download it, the file disappear immediately after I download it.”
   I also get messages like “I downloaded your software, but the zip file doesn’t contain any .exe file that I can run. Please fix the zip file in your Web site because I want to use your software”.
   Both of these problems occur because there is Antivirus software that runs in the background and delete the .zip file or the .exe file stored in the zip file.

That’s all for now. I just want to clarify that all the stories that I mentioned in this Blog post are based on real email messages that were sent by real people. It’s not a joke for April Fools’ Day.

NirLauncher is a package of more than 100 utilities of  NirSoft Web site with a launcher application that allows you to easily find and launch the desired utility or its help file.
A few months ago, I released the first Beta of this package in this Blog, and finally, now NirLauncher has a separated Web site with the latest package available to download.

The Web site address of  NirLauncher Web site is http://launcher.nirsoft.net/

Starting from today, NirLauncher package will also be updated more frequently than before. The latest version and the last update date are automatically displayed in the download page, so you’ll be able to easily see when there is a new package to download.
There is a new update from today, which includes all utilities changes made since the last NirLauncher release and the new FlashCookiesView utility. There is also a small improvement in NirLauncher application – it now allows you to launch the selected utility simply by pressing the Enter key. You can also change the functionality of Enter key in ‘Advanced Options’ window.

NirLauncher Download Page

Just a week ago, I released the first Beta of NirLauncher package to download from this Blog.  For the beginning, I deliberately released this package quietly only in my Blog, and added some download restrictions, because this package is relatively large, and I wanted to make sure that my server won’t be overloaded by large amount of users that download this package in the same time.  even with this “quiet” release and these download restrictions, I still got a large peak of users that downloaded the Beta release of NirLauncher.

A day after I released this package, it was published in lifehacker and other well-known Web sites, which caused a large visitors peak that I had never seen before. At some point, my server load was pretty high, due to large amount of users that downloaded this package concurrently.

The users pick that I got after the NirLauncher release can be easily seen in the site statistics of Google Analitics.  On October 5th, the number of unique visitors reached to nearly 50,000,  which is around 40% more than a usual day.

NirLauncher release in Google Analitics.

On alexa Web site, you can also see the visitors peak after NirLauncher release, but the visitors peak is not sharp as in Google Analitics, because there are other peaks appeared during september, from unknown reason. Obviously, Google Analitics is more accurate than Alexa, because Alexa only counts the visitors with Alexa toolbar, while Google Analitics counts all visitors with JavaScript enabled Web browser.

NirLauncher release in Alexa

Another impressive result from NirLauncher release is the number of remarks in the release post (currently 55), which is quite nice relatively to my inactive Blog.  Be aware that I haven’t had time yet to read all yours remarks deeply, but I’ll certainly consider them in further NirLauncher releases.

In my previous post, I said that the largest available flash drive is 64 GB.
So I discovered that I was wrong, Because just a week ago, Kingston announced about the first 128 GB flash drive in the market.

If you are really a millionaire that want to waste your money, you can purchase this flash drive in a special price of $1065 at Amazon.

If you are not a millionaire, wait 2 years, and then you’ll be able to purchase the same flash drive in less than 10% of the price that it’s sold today.
In that time, we’ll probably see the first 512 GB or even 1 TB flash drives in the market.

3 of my utilities that stopped working under Windows 7 – RegFromApp, ProcessActivityView, and SocketSniff, are now fixed and works properly with Windows 7.
These utilities failed to work with Windows 7 due to some changes made in Windows 7 kernel, and you can read more about these kernel changes, here.

In addition to the updates for Windows 7, I also added x64 downloads for RegFromApp, ProcessActivityView, and RunAsDate utilities.

I just tested a few of my utilities on Windows 7 Beta.

The test included IE PassView, IECacheView, Network Password Recovery, SysExporter, RegScanner, Dialupass, CurrPorts, DriverView, LSASecretsView, and more.
It seems that all tested utilities work fine under Windows 7, as you can see in the following screenshot:

Since I started to collect general statistics about Web browser usage of nirsoft.net, 4 years ago, there was a gradual increase in usage of Firefox, while the usage of Internet Explorer gradually decreased.
According to statistics of the last month (December 2008), 29.2% of nirsoft.net visitors use Firefox as thier Web browser, while 55.8% of visitors use Internet Explorer.

For more nirsoft.net statistics, click here.