Dr. Christopher Kunz

By way of a discussion in #php.de @ IRCNet, I stumbled about “phpshield.com” which offers a PHP encoding solution for a deadbeat price of 55 bucks. Other choices, like SourceGuardian, ioncube or Zend are much more pricy.

However, the phpShield.com home page did not offer the slightest clue who actually is behind that product. How someone would entrust their PHP scripts (which obviously include their intellectual property) to a product that’s not only closed-source but also sold by an anonymous third party is beyond me.

It’s common practise to whitelabel your solutions and sell them under different brands with different feature sets to different target audiences. We do this with gameservers and hosting, too. However, we always clearly state who is behind the whitelabelled solution (and we are also obliged to do this by law, which I think is good). The phpshield people do not have any clue on their pages. The domain is registered to this dude:

Administrative Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent (qjprnbdw@whoisprivacyprotect.com)
+1.4252740657
Fax: +1.4256960234
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St - F1
C/O phpshield.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
US
Hm. Their hoster, hostovo, belongs to an Inovica Ltd. in the UK. Waitaminute... inovica? Ah yes, the guys that sell SourceGuardian for over 4 times the price of PHPShield. And oddly enough, PHPShield.com’s privacy policy lists Inovica Ltd. as the sole proprietor of any IP on the page. I’m seeing a pattern here...

I really have to ask: Why are they trying to hide? To me, that is not acceptable business practice. Incidentially, I’m currently evaluationg PHP encoding solutions for a customer request and I just struck one off the list.

UPDATE: Adrian has responded in a very helpful comment, clearing a lot of the issues up. Please check the comments to this entry.

Update:



21:49:49 recorda absynth: sicherheitsscripts ist doch voll umsonst wenn ich ne .htaccess mach kann
eh niemand rein in das script ausser dem admin der das cms benutzt

(aus #php.de)

Also, Leute gibt’s... soeben in #php.de (IRCNet) gesichtet: http://phpfi.com/77763

Auszüge siehe erweitertem Eintrag (und nein, bis auf leichte Modifikationen an den Fragen ist da nix getürkt)...