Major Sandboxie News: Sandboxie is now a free tool with plans to transition it to an open source tool

Scott Cox said:

 Is there any other product like Sandboxie out there? 

Thoughts?

Scott Cox said:

What would Sophos have to charge to make SB a viable, profitable product?  It seems to provide protection not found anywhere else.

Thoughts?

Apparently more than what people would be willing or possibly capable of paying.

While it indeed provides protection not found anywhere else its not a tool that can be easily used by ordinary users. Its a tool for experts.

I think the user base is just not large enough for a < 50$ tool to be profitable and at the same time > 500$ probably most people would be reluctant to pay.

I don't think that the sandboxie concept is mass compatible at least not without massive rework which is expensive.

On the other hand with a massive rework that makes it n00b compatible it would become much more automatized and would superficially not differentiate itself that much from other offerings which are much simple and just do "sandboxing" by using a separate user account.

For me and I think for many others the appeal of sandbox is its FileSystem and Registry virtualization. But there are simpler ways to achieve a similar level of security by using a VM or just a separated user account. The greatness of sandboxie lyes in the transparent virtualization that allows one to test out things with installed applications or test out new applications without the need to alter the actual system.

So one can install an update to a program into a sandbox and check out if one likes it.

Or one can use sandboxie to audit what changes a particular installer is doing to the system before letting it mes with the real system.

And much more...

All great things to do, but only experts do them.

The average Jo just wants some protection and just that can be achieved much simpler. Using techniques which are not so prone to failure whenever MSFT changes something internally.

I think making sandboxie opensource in this day and age is the right way to go to ensure it will continue to be maintained.

>Have you tried https://www.shadesandbox.com/

>Have you tried https://www.shadowdefender.com/

Are these still being developed?

I use Shadow Defender (mainly when Sandboxie refuses to run an installer), but the author did not respond to an email. Nevertheless, it's good IMO but requires a reboot after each use to get back to a 'normal' environment. Contrast that with Sandboxie where it is easy to 'throw away' a sandbox and start over without needing to reboot.

I tried but didn't like Shades.

The is also the Microsoft Windows 10 Sandbox, but I find it a PITA and too limited by comparison. It may be more secure though.

@Argos A  I can't get into the financials around Sandboxie.  However, I can say that the idea of reselling lifetime licenses that you refer to is not something that I ever heard discussed internally. 

Will you ever tell us what actually happened to the other forum? In the previous updates you said the problems were not only technical. Now that you're going to make Sandboxie open source I don't see what reasons would you have to keep certain things private. Are there other parties involved?

Also, I'm still curious to know why you made this forum private, requiring users to log in even just to read it.

The other forum is from a different owner, uses different software and a different host, why would the new owner want to maintain two separate forums? No one would want this.

And these forums are not blocked in any way. I can access this very post from my phone or any other device I have which are not logged into. You keep spewing this, so maybe update your bookmarks to the proper url, or learn how your adblockers/umatrix/whatever work and how they can break sites before blaming others, because this is not an issue anyone else is having but you.

I also can't get into the old sandboxie.com forums, the link gets redirected to this Sophos forum. There is a wealth of information there that is being denied to us.

But were there any procedures to check the possibility to be exploited (with online or offline activations) or maybe it was difficult in legal terms to prove such an exploit?
I am asking because if a user was accurate with his claims in a post on this thread which he (or maybe Sophos for inappropriate tone) removed and also from posts he made when there was the problem with the old forum and licenses a few months back (different username but I have no doubt the same guy):
he has a 6digit number of followers,
he promoted Sandboxie and sold licenses (apparently his own lifetime one)

If that's the case it means a non negligible amount of people were (and still are) willing to pay for Sandboxie but the money ended up in the wrong pocket -  and perhaps other similar cases are out there.

Redacted said:

The other forum is from a different owner

The owner was Invincea, now owned by Sophos, it's not really a different owner. I'm perfectly fine if they don't want to be involved with Sandboxie's development anymore when/if they release the source code, but the old forum has a lot of valuable information that is undocumented. They could just allow the community to migrate the forum elsewhere.

Redacted said:

these forums are not blocked in any way

It's not just me, multiple users have reported this. There is no ad blocking issue, that's not how ad blockers work. The last time I posted I still had to log in even just to read the forum, that's not an ad blocking issue, though, now I checked again, and I wasn't required to log in. Honestly I don't know what they're doing, I just hope they do know what they're doing.

Hopefully, releasing the content of the old forum will be part of the public release of the program.

It would be great if someone can package the complete content of the forum into a compressed file that is browsable offline.