SoS users, and SoS, might be best advised to tread carefully where this India-based ‘developer’ is concerned. It ran two promotions on another giveaway website earlier this year, one for this offer and another for a document converter. It not only wants $100 a year, every year, for each product — unbelievable enough in itself — but, rather more disturbingly, wants the user’s telephone number as well as name and email address.

One person who downloaded and trialed its doc converter couldn’t get it to perform so having tried the developer’s website support and getting nowhere, rang the support telephone line instead, where a ‘technician’ said he would like to access the user’s computer to see what might be going wrong.

The activation process for the software I trialled — AKick Data Recovery — was a continuing shambles whilst the website functioned but briefly before falling down. My brief experience of the product was that it did not begin to relate to the promises made for it (especially the promise that all recoverable files can be viewed prior to retrieval: utter nonsense — not one ‘found’ jpeg was viewable) and that in terms of speed and performance it didn’t match existing, widely available freeware.

Seeking to charge $100 a year rent for software that merits no such licensing arrangement is one thing; seeking to acquire individual telephone numbers, quite another, and especially when its ‘support department’ (which on the evidence so far appears to be incapable of even supporting the company itself) wishes a user to grant it computer access so as to fix what might be wrong with it.

Hmmmm. Where have we heard of all this before?

Impossible to download from …hub.exe!