ImmerseCMS Watch Thread

Hang on.. his logo is a jellyfish, and the slogan is "pick it up"??

If doze is right, he really does have a sting in the tentacle!

Yes, the "phone home" code was Alex’s idea. I ran across it about two years ago, and asked him about it. Helping to remove it (I had already tracked down all of it in the code) was one of my first contributions to MODx.

There was quite a "vigilante" atmosphere there in those days; there was a Hall of Shame forum for "ratting out" any sites found without a visible link to Etomite. I paid Alex to remove that from a client site (including the manger login page), and my client was sent a nasty (anonymous) email via the contact form about stealing code or something (it was in German, so I can’t quote it). That caused a bit of an uproar in the forums; Alex was rather angry. It was around this time that I did successfully rename the manager folder, after two or three days of picking through the files looking for references to it.

At the time, Alex and I were discussing the issue, and he sent me a link to a "company" that actually did have a rebranded Etomite for sale. I asked them what they were doing, and they said it was only a test, and would be removing it, which apparently they did.

Quote from: doze at Nov 20, 2006, 03:55 PM

When i changed to modx from etomite about a year ago, there was a lot of talk about a security issue in eto. There was some base 64 encoded code in eto in few places that sent emails to some address about eto usage and site details. At that time, eto devs (dean and ralph) found about it by suprice and there was talk that alex had originally put that in because there had been issues that eto was reselled on the web with labels changed etc. I don’t know if its true that alex had put that code in there, so DON’T quote me on this. I think that the threads can be still found in eto forums. But anyways, thats one reason that got me into looking better cms’es. If thats true, i wouldnt install anything that alex has coded without full code review. Later i found out that dean reads eto users private messages on the forum too.. Nice people.. But thats another story.

I couldn’t have said it better. I can understand Alex’s code to try and thwart copiers but Dean’s actions are unacceptable. He read my PM’s... Thats one *3efe3@#* of an invasion of privacy. Its like a server admin reading your email. Thats not cool....

Yeah well, like Ryan said, let’s drop it and stop wasting time with Dean.
I agree this guy is moderating like he lives in China, he even managed to get me fairly angry and I am almost never angry

At some point in the past (about 2 years ago) I had tested Etomite and liked what I saw. Then I went to the forums. A few minutes browsing threads and I was away and forgot about Eto... until I found MODx. Needless to say the mood is quite different here.

If you look at Immerse forums, the topic closing has started (hmm, the topic is re-opened)... Anyway, threads like this, I won’t answer "we already have MaxiGallery and it does this already"...

But to the point, and more interresting :

However, "You can, for example, designate areas or pages as subscriber-only content available only to certain groups." is a good point and we should use it if we don’t already. That’s the sort of thing that will attract people, even if they then find out that they have to put in their own subscription management system.

That’s a nice idea indeed

Oh, the base 64 encoded "phone home" code was truly from Alex... I think it’s VERY nasty to but that kind of code even for you seem to think that it was from right reasons.. I don’t think so. And now definitely won’t be installing immerse (wouldn’t have installed anyways, but just wanted to write that )

PS. Mark, Dean had read my PM’s too..

@Doze: What is "the base 64 encoded "phone home" code was truly from Alex" ?

Etomite has some bits of code scattered around in various files, all base64 encoded, that sends messages to the Etomite site if the copyright notice in the login page is removed. First I just gave it display:none in the CSS, then I picked through the code and removed it all. Not that I didn’t want to display the notice (in the one case where I really did, I paid for it) but that sort of thing gets my dander up. And it really won’t stop anybody who really wants to "steal" it, since even I could work around it and even remove it easily enough. Like most DRM it mostly annoys the innocent user.

Hmm, i might remember wrong, but i think there was a littlebit more in it than that.. Either it sent info even if the copyright was not removed or it allowed it to be used as a back port to the system. Or something like that, because there was a ’major’ secunia report about it.. Sorry that i have gone littlebit offtopic, but this is an interesting subject and i’d like to know the facts as Susan knows what it really was.

From what I recall, it just registered the IP of the site running Eto about 10% of the time, regardless of any backlinks or copyright notice. Regardless... a very uncool thing without permission.