It’s been crazy, since our last post things have changed wildly, most of them are good news, and that’s what i’m going to tell you. So, to begin with I would like to thank you all for spreading the word about Prey.

The Situation

Thanks to your help, the users count growth a 200%. We initially expected a slow rise but the things were quite different. In just a few weeks since Control opened the numbers were awesome, none of us expected them.

As you may know days ago when some of you tried to sign up the service was unable to send you the confirmation emails, that was because our email provider thought that we were sending spam due the huge amount sent every day. Days later the problem was that the service sent a lot of “Service Errors”, not allowing the people make use of it and finally the Server went down for a few hours.

This can only mean one thing: the server is working at full capacity.

We’re now in the process of migrating to a new home — this time a dedicated server –, but even if this solves all the problems I just mentioned, it give us a new one… Money. As you know, and I repeat it again, this software and service are Free & Open-Source and it’s going to stay like that forever, even if we have to work twice as we do now. And remember, you are always welcome to donate some cents, code or even both :D.

The Giveaway

Because we love you, and we want to make your life easier, we have done a Screencast of how install Prey. Because of my bad spoken English I preferred to do it in Spanish, but I also added English subtitles so you can understand what I’m saying. Of course, if you want to help us translate it to other languages, send us a mail and we’ll send you the subtitles to do it. Even better, if you can give us your voice, it would be nice to dub it.

In the other news, I can tell you we are working on new modules and also developer documentation so anyone can create new modules more easily. We’ve noticed that Windows users have been able to uninstall Prey easily, as well in Ubuntu. As for other linux distros, those users are capable enough to use the Shell and work with commands (well, most of them) but we’ve realized that not all Mac users know how to use the terminal, and others get scared just for hearing about commands so I want to tell you that we are working in a graphical, clean and easy way to do it and should be available soon.

Oh, and I almost forgot that we’ve done a nicer DMG (the package where the Mac Installer comes).

As you may know, a few weeks ago we launched a new way of controlling Prey, by using a web control panel that allows you to activate it remotely with just a few clicks.

Being still in early stages, we had thought that this new service would start off slowly but things have been quite different: we’ve already passed the 1000 user mark! Best of all, it seems to be working really good and it keeps to grow steadily, so we’re very pleased with how things are working out. So big thanks to everyone.

Now, as you may imagine, the control panel does get some load (after all it’s being constantly hit by requests from Prey in devices all over the world), so we decided to take some precautionary measures to reduce the server load, and make sure it keeps up and running as a rock. Most of the stuff you won’t even notice (it’s mainly got to do with caching), but there’s one which you will, and that is that devices will hold a maximum of 10 reports from now on.

Basically nothing happens until you reach your 10-report limit. But if you do, new reports that arrive will “push” the old ones out, deleting the oldest records as well as their associated files.

Being a free service, we simply cannot offer an unlimited amount of record-keeping for devices and certainly not unlimited storage (for your screenshots and webcam snapshots). In fact, with how things are going we’ll probably have to upgrade soon to a bigger server! Anyway, we think that 10 reports is a good number, and probably more than enough to keep track of your computer (heck, probably with just two or three reports you’d be able to catch the guy!).

We’ve also received some requests to raise the maximum number of registered devices on the control panel, but for the same reasons as above we’ll have to say no for the moment. Now, what we are indeed figuring out is whether or not to enable some kind of premium (payed) accounts, that allow registering more devices on the control panel (and perhaps access to more features). We still haven’t made out our minds on this, so we would love to hear your opinions to have a better view of things (through the mailing list please!).

Anyway, you must know that if we do enable premium accounts, we will still (always!) have free accounts for everyone (with a limit, but free as in beer). And of course, needless to say, Prey will be open source software for the rest of eternity. That, you don’t have to worry about.

Hello everyone!

It’s been some exciting weeks since the release of Prey 0.3. We’ve received a ton of feedback and new ideas, and more developers are joining the team and making contributions to make Prey even better.

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