There's something going on then. It shouldn't take DAYS for a major software provider to get back online. The descriptions of cobbled attempts to resurrect a working server somewhere "in an hour or two" don't do much to inspire confidence either.

Looks like it may be time to find an alternative.

I agree. I can't believe that a company as big as Sophos can't get the website and forum rehosted by now, and with secure community software. I'm not installing 5.30 until the licensing server is back up and running.

I also hope this is not the end of Sandboxie, as I can't find anything functionally equivalent. 

As the website is now down for a week or so, it would be appreciated if Sandboxie support or the developers can let us know the latest status and provide more details about the problem.

If you open the Sandboxie Control and click "Check For Update" then sometimes the message "Update check is already in progress. Please wait." appears.
Is the problem due to this Update check and is it trying to reach the main website "www.sandboxie.com" ?

The main website is also used for licensing via URL: www.sandboxie.com/index.php
And the updated version 5.30 still uses the same approach for licensing.

Most software products are using a subdomain or another domainname for activation and updates so you can separate the webtraffic to other servers. Would this be an option ?
If you could bring out another version which uses another URL for licensing like activate.sandboxie.com/index.php then at least the users would have the chance to install the new version and get licensed again.

This also applies for the website. If only www.sandboxie.com is used by the software, then it would be possible to run the website on sandboxie.com without the wwww.

Sandboxie is good software and it would be a shame and disappointing if it would be gone forever.
There is simply no other product that can give this protection with minimal effort.

Barb@Sophos said:

Glad to hear things are fine now. We did not make any changes, so not sure what could have happened. 

You must be joking, right? There was a checksum mismatch and you don't know why? So who can access "your" servers  beside you? Are you auditing SB source code? If you can't guard you ftp, your code probably already carries a malicious payload...

Hi Jarosław Glaca ,

Most likely, they checked the hash using the wrong executable files. Nothing changed on our end and our files are fine. 
The SHAs and MD5s were corroborated an posted along with the new builds. 

Regards,

Hi,

I've just got the update loop bug and found my way here.
The SandboxieInstall.exe file found on https://www.sandboxie.com/DownloadSandboxie is for version 5.28 (I've checked the hash and even reinstalled it to confirm it is version 5.28).
There is no installer for version 5.30 on the Sandboxie website. There is no mention of version 5.30 on the list changes page and on the md5/sha1 page.

My first thought was that the website has been hacked because the announcement on the main page https://www.sandboxie.com/ contains spelling mistakes (suppport, which the last version that supports XP).

Hey Johnny B1 ,

Our dev team is currently making changes to the site. Please use the alternative links:
     [Click here for alternative links]

We'll correct the spelling mistake. The site is not hacked, it was down due to issues as explained in the first post. Thanks for bringing this up!

Regards,

Thanks for the quick answer. Just one more question. Before I found out about version 5.30 I've blocked SbieCtrl.exe from connecting to the internet using my firewall to stop the update loop. It's OK if I keep using version 5.28 until you fix the website to avoid possible problems with the licensing server if I install v5.30?

Hi Johnny B1 ,

We are requesting all of our customers to upgrade to  Sandboxie 5.30 as soon as possible. 

We are not going to provide support to versions older than that one.  

Thanks!

How about an update? Why it's taking so long to fix and when things will be back to normal.