SmartHide with Danny

…After exactly 3 months a new version in line 2.1 was released. Connect from the tray menu, connect cancellation, automatic update and ticket sending to the support via the form in the software – here are the main features of that release. We also re-wrote completely the interaction system with the VPN process. Now everything worked quite stable and there were no unpleasant hanging ups or delays during the connection.

Version 2.1.101 [March 19 2008]

• New: VPN management mechanism has been fully revised.
• New: Connect/disconnect possibility from the tray.
• New: Possibility to stop SmartHide during the connection.
• New: Server selection feature for the connection from tray.
• New: SmartHide automatic update.
• New: SmartHide dedicated RAM volume has been decreased.
• New: Automatic servers rollover option during the connection.
• New: Possibility of sending an e-mail to the support department with the diagnostic information right from SmartHide.
• New: New error messages display window.
• New: Lots of other minor modifications and improvements.
• Fixed: Administrator privileges identification during domain authentication.
• Fixed: Incorrect tray icon display during SmartHide connection.
• Fixed: SmartHide freezing during the connection.
• Fixed: Lots of minor, non-critical errors.

The release of version 2.1.121 followed after that. An icon of a grey octopus appeared in the tray. The icon informed that SmartHide was in the process of server connection. Users could write to the support department from the tray menu item (the access to the form before was only possible in case of the error connection). Lots of various bugs were fixed.

Version 2.1.121 [April 9 2008]

• New: Grey icon in the tray for the states “Connecting” and “Disconnecting”.
• New: Driver installation instructions in the installer.
• New: Support department contact from the menu in the tray.
• New: SmartHide localization into Dutch by Marc Lacrosse.
• New: Some GUI modifications
• Fixed: Bug with a tray icon when the servers rollover option is on.
• Fixed: Bug with logs sending from the support department contact form.
• Fixed: SmartHide freezing when “DHCP client” service is deactivated.
• Fixed: Freezing during the connect if the file vpn.sms is not available in the folder.
• Fixed: Bug with the live update.

…In December 2007 the last version in line 2.0 was released. SmartHide became quite user-friendly. Automatic connect at the startup appeared, there was no need to press the button ‘Apply settings’ during server selection (you could just click Connect). Everything was OK until the Chinese found out about us. At that time the user base was growing very actively and achieved 50k of users. However most of them were utilizing a trial version. After that the Chinese government found out about our product and banned our domain. The support department got tons of e-mails with just one question: why does it say that the authorization did not complete successfully? And the reason was that we authorized all the users with the help of one script which could be accessed via the banned domain only. We started to think of alternative ways and came up to the mechanism which went over the available domains and tried to connect to them.

Version 2.0.74 [December 19 2007]

• New: Ability to connect to the server automatically at SmartHide startup.
• New: Disconnect notification is now always shown as a balloon over the tray.
• New: Login, password and IP-address are saved automatically by pressing the button “Make me invisible”.
• New: Integration with the new SmartHide purchase system.
• New: Some changes in the GUI.
• Fixed: Automatic selection of a new default server IP address if the previous server IP is not available in the servers list.
• Fixed: Information regarding SmartHide stop is not shown in the Log anymore.
• Fixed: “View SmartHide Help” link in the Help tab.
• Fixed: SmartHide detects 64-bit OS’s in the installation wizard

At that time one of the guys from China contacted us and offered his help in promoting SmartHide in PRC. The service was not free of charge, of course. As the compensation for his services he asked to grant a paid account to him. However, after banning our domain by the China government we urgently had to release a new distributive under the same number. We gave a distributive link to our Chinese guy and he, in its turn, forwarded the link to everyone, who got interested in it. And since in that period we did not check if the user had a paid or a trial account and we hoped that the paid version would remain with paid users only, what we got was thousands of freeloaders taking up our paid servers capacities. We had to ban them all and rename the distributives.

To be continued…

…Almost a month after that we released a version with the automatic servers list update. There were certain drawbacks in there, but this feature was a definite breakthrough at that time. We also integrated the authorization. Before that every user who had SmartHide installed could connect with any login and password… seems like that. The authorization took place via the VPN independent script which was located on our server, where SmartHide was hosted. In the future it caused us lots of trouble.

Version 2.0.46 [September 19 2007]

• New: Autoupdate of available servers list
• New: Notify about account expiring
• New: Notify about wrong login or password
• New: Loading screen

After that, during a month and a half we released two more versions, where we corrected Vista compatibility and did not allow SmartHide to install on x64 OS.

Version 2.0.56 [November 1 2007]

• New: German localization
• New: Internal setting for connecting to servers

Version 2.0.49 [October 8 2007]

• New: Install Wizard does not allow installing SmartHide on not supported OSs.
• New: SmartHide works only under Administrator account with the admin privileges.
• Fixed: In Windows 2000\XP SmartHide did not change IP address if it was not launched under administrator account.
• Fixed: SmartHide did not change IP address in some cases in Windows Vista.
• Fixed: SmartHide did not save account login and password in some cases in Windows Vista.

To be continued…

Here are some of the memories from the past of SmartHide Dev. Team to cheer up a little bit

Well, it all started long time ago with SmartHide v. 1.0 and the search for our own way. We tried to write a driver which would intercept certain protocols. After that we tried to add UDT which increased the data transfer speed in the network almost twice as much. We tested the interception of network API’s with the help of dll injection. We did a bunch of different things trying to feel around for the right solution. Our experiments brought us to Open VPN. The interaction with the OVPN process and the minimal functionality were added to GUI. The major version modification took place. SmartHide became 2.0 after that.

On August 25, 2007 we released the first official, not beta, version. As far as I remember we did not integrate billing at that time and could not sell the software. That’s why everybody who was interested received trial versions from us. There was no server list update mechanism at that moment. Each time we wanted to add a new server we had to recompile and upload the program. The releases followed each other one by one. We issued 3 versions during 4 days.

Version 2.0.36 [August 28 2007]

• New: Added new server in Great Britain for Trial version

Version 2.0.35 [August 27 2007]

• New: Some changes in the GUI

Version 2.0.34 [August 25 2007]

• New: UDP based data transfer
• New: LZO data compress
• New: SSL data encryption
• New: Transfer UDP and TCP traffic
• New: Using tun/tap driver

I also remember that there were some problems with the reconnection – it just did not work properly. It was necessary to activate the disconnect notification in the first run to make sure that reconnection is functioning. But the notification was in a simple message box and as long as you do not press OK manually, no automatic reconnection took place. The message stating that “you are using a trial version, please consider purchasing the software” was not readable at all. I’m sure that nobody read it.

To be continued…