29 September 2008

Undercover 2.5 has landed

We are proud to release Undercover 2.5, the only theft-recovery solution that has been designed exclusively for Mac OS X.
The update is free for all registered Undercover users


Changes since Undercover 2.0
- We removed the dead-Mac feature in which a Mac would start plan B if offline for more than two months, even if it's not listed as stolen. We hoped that this feature would have helped us recover stolen Macs that are never connected. In reality, the feature did not help at all, not even in one case.
- Memory footprint and CPU usage have been dramatically reduced. In most cases, memory footprint is down 75%.
- In addition, Undercover 2.5 sports dozens of under-the-hood improvements and fixes.
- Undercover 2.5 now automatically replaces all previous versions. Simply run the installer and you are all set.


How to upgrade from any previous Undercover version
- Download Undercover 2.5 from the Undercover website and run the installer.
- Undercover automatically recognizes older Undercover versions and removes them.
- Restart your Mac when prompted by the installer
- Undercover 2.5 does not recognize your previous registration: you will need to enter your email address and license key again. You can find your license key in the email that has been sent by Kagi after your purchase. This email has been sent by admin@kagi.com, you may use Spotlight to find it.
- You will then receive the Undercover ID for the Mac you installed Undercover on.


Check whether Undercover is running on your Mac
Undercover will require you to re-enter your Kagi license key. After registration, you will receive an email containing the Undercover ID for the Mac you have registered Undercover on. The fact that you are receiving the email with the UC ID means that Undercover has been successfully installed and is working properly on your Mac.
Important note: The Undercover ID is unique for a particular Mac. This is unlike the Kagi license key, which may be used on a number of Macs if you have a household or site license.

Over the coming days, registered users will be notified of this update by email.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you should add that the window that appears after the installation and the restart might take some time before it appears (for me it took 5-10 minutes).

Anonymous said...

I'm waiting for the dialog box on my end. Waited 30 mins, then reinstalled just to make sure. Still waiting. :(

Peter Schols said...

In some circumstances it might take a while for the dialog box to appear. You can always launch the registration app manually:

- Choose Go To Folder from the Finder's Go menu
- Enter the following path: /usr/bin/uc
- Launch the UndercoverRegistration app in this folder

That should do the trick.
Peter

Anonymous said...

The registration application still states that it is version 2.0 in the "About" screen. Is this normal?

Anonymous said...

Home page talks about Plan B that is no longer a feature, perhaps an update of content is required *lol*

Also as an existing customer I found out about v2.5 via Version Tracker, no communication from yourselves as yet.

Peter Schols said...

The registration application will indeed still list the 2.0 version in its about box, this one slipped under our radar. As long as the other apps are listed as 2.5, you should be all set.

Peter Schols said...

To clear things up: Plan B is still there!
With version 2.0, there were two circumstances in which plan B would be started:

1. Plan A failed (we cannot recover the stolen Mac based on its network location, screenshots and iSight pics) so we manually start plan B.

2. A Mac has been offline for more than two months, so plan B is automatically started, even though the Mac might not be listed as stolen (we can not know, as it has not been connected).

For version 2.5, we removed scenario 2. As a result, we only start plan B if a Mac has been stolen and if we are unable to locate it. This is exactly the situation we had in version 1.x.

As mentioned in the blog post, we will contact all registered users over the coming days. We plan this to be completed by this Friday (3 October). There is no reason to postpone upgrading, though, as the instructions that we'll send to our clients will be the same as in this blog post.

Unknown said...

Hello Peter,

I'm having a problem installing Undercover. It let me download the file but when I double click on the .dmg extension it does not start. I have a MacBookPro and OS 10.4.11

Thanks.
thierry

Anonymous said...

On our Mac Pro Power PC running OS X 10.4.6 the registration window popped right up as soon as I was logged in after restart. But on my MacBook Pro running 10.5.5 I had to run the registration manually.

Anonymous said...

I had to run the registration manually. MBP/10.5.5

Peter Schols said...

Dear customers / readers,

In some circumstances, it takes longer than expected for the registration window to show up. If that's the case, please follow the instructions as outlined above. We are currently looking into this problem and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

However, I'd like to stress that this issue does not affect the functioning of Undercover itself. The registration application is completely separate from the applications that communicate with our server in case of theft. The recovery feature is in no way affected by this issue.

Peter Schols said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Peter Schols said...

The registration window issue has now been fixed. See our most recent blog post

Anonymous said...

How often should I see uc making outbound connections? I have upgraded to 2.5, and I run Little Snitch, and watching the Network Monitor, I have never seen uc go out at all since the upgrade. I'm not sure if I ever used to see it with the prior version, but I just want to make sure that 2.5 is actually working. I do have a rule set up in Little Snitch to allow outbound connections for uc.

Thanks!

Peter Schols said...

Eric,

You are probably not seeing anything because of that rule that allows all uc traffic.

To check whether Undercover is running:
- Launch the Activity Monitor application in /Applications/Utilities
- Select "All processes" from the popup menu in Activity Monitor's toolbar.
- You should see a process called uc owned by root