OTX Sample

You can now append an encryption of your member’s email address into the URL with the SHA1 variable.

What is SHA-1?

The SHA-1 (SHA= “Secure Hash Algorithm”) hash function is the most secure cryptographic hash function available. Encrypting the email address of your users into SHA-1 will protect your members’ privacy and your ownership of the email (since it is computationally impossible to decrypt a SHA1 hash) while allowing us to ensure the uniqueness of survey takers’ email addresses.

What does a SHA-1 hash look like?

The SHA1-encryption produces a 40-character string.

Example:

panelist@yahoo.com becomes: “dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde”

How to add it to survey entry link?

&sha1=[40-digit SHA-1 hash] can be appended to any OTX survey entry link.

Example:

- survey entry link: http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe

- survey entry link with SHA1 for panelist@yahoo.com : http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe&sha1=dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde

- survey entry link with SHA1 and PID for panelist@yahoo.com (member 12345): http://survey.otxresearch.com/SurveyEntry.aspx?e=60170063-3788-4eb3-913b-a7c6ff2f4dbe&sha1=dd7050b86e4273115e80b08be85580be304abbde&pid=12345

What’s the effect of using the SHA-1 hash?

There are no effects at this time. We will just collect the SHA-1 for every respondent you send into our systems.

In a few weeks though, we will turn on some additional security features based on frequency and past participation. These rules will add to the current existing ones based on panelist id (PID) and various cookies and objects, and will consequently make it more difficult for professional survey takers to take multiple surveys in our system.

Hello world!

Our server (and consequently all live surveys) will be going down for 30 minutes tomorrow (Tuesday) night from 7 PM PST to 7:30 PM PST.

We’re doing some maintenance to make it stronger, faster, better for your users. Thanks in advance for bearing with us.

The engineers at SiteAdvisor McAfee have revised their review of the OTX Research domain. We mentioned how a month ago they had classified our site as containing spyware downloads. Fortunately, they have revised their judgment and their new review is “We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems”.

If you come across other anti-spyware softwares mentioning us by mistake, please let us know so that we can fix the issue.

In the past few days, we have been contacted by partners and survey takers who were either unable to take a survey, or received warning that our domain otxresearch.com might contain downloads ‘that some people consider adware, spyware, or other unwanted programs.” Today, we were notified that the site McAfee SiteAdvisor and the anti-spyware software Spyware Doctor are classifying the otxresearch.com domain under the spyware category.

This is wrong and hurting us.

OTX has never used spywares, adwares or any other type of unwanted programs to conduct our business.

A couple of years ago, OTX was using a download software, preloader.dll. Its sole purpose was to download large video files in the beginning of the online survey-taking process to allow a better user experience for our respondents - so they wouldn’t have to wait for a video download at a particular page in a survey.

This download was never malicious. However, some antispyware companies considered it as a spyware. Why? Simply because none of those companies can determine whether it is malicious (for anyone to really know what the control does, it would require reverse engineering of the dll, a practice widely considered a federal offense).

As those erroneous spyware alerts were hurting us, and because we believe that gaining respondents’ trust is critical for our business and the research industry as a whole, we decided to stop using the download software more than a year ago. We even decided to delete the download from our servers entirely over 30 days ago to avoid any accidental use in a survey copying old survey code.

So, obviously, the reviews are defamatory and hurting our business. We have asked McAfee and the Site Advisor team to revise their review and make it clear to the readers of the site that it has erroneously identified OTX as a user of unwanted programs.

We have also published an official response, which I invite you to read.

We hope that those issues will be resolved very soon, but in the meantime, you may receive questions from your members (from our experience, it always take time for spyware software to revise their reviews and distribute an updated version to their users). Do not hesitate to contact Olivier or the rest of the Sample Team if you still have any question.

We have one or two exciting changes that are currently in the final stages of QA. These are features our suppliers asked for, and we heard you loud and clear.

We will keep you in suspense for just a bit longer, but what we WILL say is that these enhancements will have a positive impact on user experience.

Do you have an OTX wish list? Send us your observations. We are always looking for ways to improve our survey engine and reporting tools.