MobiPocket Shut Down!?

[Aenea]

Originally Posted by Bombast

Too late to edit the previous post, but here we are

AHA! The ebook wasn't activated yet! After they went up it was activated...

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Aenea

AHA! The ebook wasn't activated yet! After they went up it was activated...

According to his original complaint, it was activated before they went down, but it insists on connecting to the Mobipocket server and validating every time he tries to read it.

This is not normal behavior, and neither he nor we know what is going on.
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Dennis

[Aenea]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

According to his original complaint, it was activated before they went down, but it insists on connecting to the Mobipocket server and validating every time he tries to read it.

This is not normal behavior, and neither he nor we know what is going on.

Well, according to MobiPocket the book has to be activated first before it can be read by a particular device by adding you PID BEFORE downloading it. Offcourse I'm not sure if Mobi also has a special protection where it has to be activated every time you start to read it...

Aenea

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Aenea

Well, according to MobiPocket the book has to be activated first before it can be read by a particular device by adding you PID BEFORE downloading it. Offcourse I'm not sure if Mobi also has a special protection where it has to be activated every time you start to read it...

As far as any of the Mobi users here know, it doesn't. Once you have properly activated the book, you should not be asked to authenticate again. That's why the original poster is confused, and so are we.

(I have Mobireader installed on my PalmOS device, but haven't purchased DRM'd content, so I've never encountered the issue.)
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Dennis

[Neubarth]

Originally Posted by Bombast

Because I only have the one E-book, and I was unable to open it as long as Mobipocket stayed shut.

So in the future, I won't be buying any e-books with DRM that can't be easily stripped away. I'll just buy paper. Heck, I like bookshelves. I now have my copy of Alms for Jihad being autographed by the authors - can't do that with an E-book. ...

I will autograph any E-book that I have authored.

Gosh, how would one do that?

[Aenea]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As far as any of the Mobi users here know, it doesn't. Once you have properly activated the book, you should not be asked to authenticate again. That's why the original poster is confused, and so are we.

Funny thing is, I analyzed the file and at the place where normally the number of activated PID's is located it contained 0. After chatting with Bombast and playing with the file we managed to get it activated for my Windows Reader (it asked for username and pw again) and then copying it to my iLiad. And what do you know? That variable in the file now suddenly showed 3 and it never asked again for a re-activation!! (And offcourse it now was possible to extract the contents )

On the mobipocket dev/retailer site there's documentation where it says that you (a retailer) have to provide 'Output=prc' to the download URL (from retailer to MP) to get a working prc file for people without the windows reader. So apparantly some retailers don't do that all the time so it needs to read it again and again from an URL... If you don't want this, just send it to another device WITH the windows reader program...

Aenea

[Aenea]

Originally Posted by Neubarth

I will autograph any E-book that I have authored.

Gosh, how would one do that?

Well, actually, there's a way Among other things, I like to look at the book covers from paper books. When I see it on my bookshelf or somewhere else in my home I always want to start reading it. With ebooks, you can only see them when you checkout your bookshelf page/program... Not the same...

So, what do I do when I buy an ebook? I find a high-quality cover image and print it out on photo paper, looks very nice! And the back of that cover image is very, very white, so how about signing it there?

Aenea

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As far as any of the Mobi users here know, it doesn't. Once you have properly activated the book, you should not be asked to authenticate again. That's why the original poster is confused, and so are we.

(I have Mobireader installed on my PalmOS device, but haven't purchased DRM'd content, so I've never encountered the issue.)
______
Dennis

I've never bought from MobiPocket, but when you buy a DRM'd book from Fictionwise, you manually enter your MobiPocket ID(s) on their web site before you download the book. There's no communication at all between your device and Fictionwise - presumably if you enter the ID wrongly, your book simply doesn't work on that device. Perhaps if you buy through the PC MobiPocket Reader it does something "smarter" and automates the process, and it's that which didn't work when the site was down? That's just a guess.

[LauretteBradley]

I have used Mobipocket for years. I tried logging in today and got the message that THEY had reset MY password. I clicked through the reset password option for them to send an email to my gmail account.... but nothing arrived.

Then I started reading the forum. A LARGE NUMBER of people are in the same boat. Mobipocket "reset" passwords on 8/24/2007. Some people are successful at getting new passwords sent to their email, but some people seem to be getting emails sent to old email accounts.

It sounds to me like mobipocket had a major crash on 8/24 -- this was the time when they were down for many days -- and lost considerable information-- at least passwords and email addresses. Rather than provide any support on the site, they make it MOST inconvenient to recover your information -- I will spare you my whole saga...

Does anybody know more about this? Their operations seem pretty gimcrack.

[wallcraft]

There are other threads on this subject. From MobiPocket's Forum (Full Explanation on the Maintenance Outage Time):

We took the site offline because we recently learned of an attempt to gain access to a Mobipocket server. The issue was discovered on August 15, at which point we immediately took the Mobipocket servers off the internet. Once we had more specific information, and reset passwords as a precaution.

This is the most likely explanation for the long outage I have seen. One poster on MobiPocket's Forum suggested their Visa card number had actually been stolen from MobiPocket, but that is always hard to prove.

[cherdman]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

There are other threads on this subject. From MobiPocket's Forum (Full Explanation on the Maintenance Outage Time): This is the most likely explanation for the long outage I have seen. One poster on MobiPocket's Forum suggested their Visa card number had actually been stolen from MobiPocket, but that is always hard to prove.

Sounds like a pretty good reason to be down for so long. I do wish they would have informed the public with a bit more information on what was going on though. I wonder if they thought that would compromise their investigations somehow.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by cherdman

Sounds like a pretty good reason to be down for so long. I do wish they would have informed the public with a bit more information on what was going on though. I wonder if they thought that would compromise their investigations somehow.

My guess s that if they told us, they'd have even more people trying to hack them.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

My guess s that if they told us, they'd have even more people trying to hack them.

Well it's hard to hack something that's been taken down already, right?

There ain't no security through obscurity.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Well it's hard to hack something that's been taken down already, right?

There ain't no security through obscurity.

Very true. You cannot hack into a website if the website isn't there.

I do think that by giving us no information until after the problem was was solved (while annoying) was the right thing to do.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I do think that by giving us no information until after the problem was was solved (while annoying) was the right thing to do.

I disagree. At the moment they discovered someone attempted to hack their server(s) they could not have known the extend of the hack. Likewise, they could not have ruled out that any customer-sensitive information leaked out. Had I been a customer, I would have insisted in being notified immediately of the potential thread that someone illegally obtained my personal information (which may have included sensitive data such as my credit card number).