Posted in News, Press Releases |
Over the past few days a lot of TinyGrab users will have noticed the significant drop in our usually excellent service. Many of you are frustrated with our downtime, errors and confusing messages. A few of you have fled to alternative services, some of you have even issued death threats and have tracked down my personal phone number and address to send me abusive messages (It’s a free app, come on!), now it’s time to tell you properly what’s been going on.
First of all I would like to apologise for the lack of any clear communication. We’ve been putting out fires left, right and centre and just haven’t had time to write a post to let you all know what’s been going on. Now that we’ve finally managed to hit Inbox Zero, I can finally take some time to explain everything.
Earlier this week we were the victim of a malicious attack on one of our servers. Sadly this attack was on the server where TinyGrab version 1 was hosted. Through a security hole in our old service a user was able to gain remote access and corrupt a major and significant part of our original code base (if not all of it). No user or grab data was stolen, accessed or lost during the attack, thankfully it was isolated to only one server and our databases and files are stored elsewhere. Unfortunately this rendered TinyGrab useless, we were forced to launch TinyGrab 2.0 prematurely.
Like all premature babies, TinyGrab 2.0 just wasn’t ready for mainstream usage. We’ve been working on it for a full year now, but it still needed more time to develop properly and work out all of the bugs. Because of the security breach we had to rewrite a large part of our system and applications over night. Fortunately we’d successfully launch TinyGrab 2.0 Windows a few days before the attack, so that platform was left almost untouched. However our Mac client had to be re-written into TinyGrab Mini in 12 hours, in order for users to continue to use the service.
TinyGrab Mini for Mac is a temporary fix, it’s a band aid. In order to get the app out as quickly as possible we stripped out most major functionality and allowed it to do two things; login and auto-upload. In this age of minimalism the app’s quite chic, but it’s no where near the high standards that TinyGrab typically maintains.
You’ll have noticed that over the past few days, along with TinyGrab 2.0, new features are popping up. These will be polished and further explained later, along with the desktop app for Mac.
I want to take the time to thank all of you for your continued patience and support whilst we’ve been recovering from this almost disastrous event. I would also like to thank all of the TinyGrab team; those who have been up, with me, for the past 3/4 days straight, answering your support queries, bug quashing and developing applications for you to use. All of us here at TinyGrab work on this voluntarily, none of us do this as a full time job and we don’t see any financial return out of it. The money we gain from advertising and from sales keep the servers running. We do it because we love it.
Thank you, users, for being there and keeping us going. Without you there’d be no need for TinyGrab. Thank you, team, for powering on. Together we’ve all pulled through and ought to be back up to normal capacity in a week or two.
Because every cloud has a silver lining, especially the TinyGrab one, this attack has inadvertently meant that the incredibly delayed TinyGrab 2.0 has sort of launched… It’s a pity that it’s not as polished as we wanted it to be though.
Chris Leydon
TinyGrab Founder and Project Manager.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 at 4:38 pm and is filed under News, Press Releases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Thanks for taking the time to write this post
it explains a lot now.
Keep on the good work and i hope we will soon see a better polished version of tinygrab 2 for mac
I just started using TinyGrab 2 for Windows, and am loving it. Beautiful app design! Only thing it’s missing is capturing the Aero drop shadow. Otherwise, though, works great. Hope things get easier for you soon!
Thanks, we’re particularly proud of our Windows app. We’re hoping to give the Mac app the exact same amount of polish and love.
I tried to update to 2.0, but it doesn’t work on PowerPC… I’m still stuck on a G5 with 10.5, any chance it’ll be supported for 2.0?
I’m one of your frustrated users, but I’m sorry anyone would actually invade your privacy like that. It’s sad you have customers that would cross the line that way.
All the best.
I really love my TinyGrab and am quite frustrated I can’t use it. Regardless I understand what you’re going through, just hold on (and finish it as soon as you can).
Hi.
Since new TinyGrab it doesn’t really works.
On the website panel : I can upload a file. I see it in the “TinyGrab Control Panel” but if I clic on the short link the file doesn’t display.
And in the TinyGrab Mac App if I put a file on the menubar icon, it shows the green stick as if it was uploaded but if I check on the website panel, the file is not there.
I understand it is a beta, have you head about these troubles ?
thanks.
i cannot use mini with my mac OS for some reason. when i downloaded the 5 mb version it immediately became evident i could not use it, and when i click on the new version, it tells me it is not possible to be used. but i have leopard and there should be nothing wrong, what should i try? i just want mini, or 2.0, or anything that will work for me at this time because i love the program. thanks
thnx for let us know, i was one of the users that run to other client bc my workflow of exchaging screenshots. thnx again…. keep us posted =) and we love it too
…. still cant use miniGrab bc a error: Time vortex rejected u
I’ve tried to download the latest version for my Mac, but it turns out to be version 1.1 even though the download page says that it is version 2.0. And the update fails every time…
It happened the same with me, so I decide in changing the URL to: http://tinygrab.com/downloads/app/TinyGrab2.0.dmg but it still seem to not work as expected :/
I downloaded minitinygrab (TinyGrabMini1.1.dmg), installed it and started it. When I did so and entered my account information it only appeared on the menubar and along with “file, edit, etc.” appearing on the menubar as well. No TinyGrab application showed up at all.
I cant download the older version (that worked for me) of TinyGrab and I’m stuck. What can I do to make this all better?
Thanks,
Ryan
Yup, same here. Automatic update failed too, btw.
Yes here too, please fix it – it is absolutly useless
It’s not a free app if you’ve paid for the premium support. I’m not happy!
Got the 2.0 version for mac. It crashes every time I log in.
[...] won’t be of any surprise to hear that the TinyGrab security breach, detailed in our last blog post, came as a huge blow to the team here. We know we haven’t handled the situation perfectly at [...]