Zend Guard

[William R]

This would be great against piracy. But you dont have to encrypt every single file. What IPS should do, encrypt the files that only let hackers hack the IPB. Or if that cant be done, you could do something new for ipb 2.2 have like all the security/piracy in one folder. I dont know, if anyone agrees with me or can think of any other ideas would be great.

[Quillz]

A few releases in the past were Zend encoded, and it proved to be largely unpopular.

[princetontiger]

You can say good bye to invisionize if this did happen. Visual source, as IPB is, remains pretty popular.

[Dark Phantom]

It would only require a few files, stuff that a modification would never test, perhaps specfic files made for just for this job. The problem is no matter what they do, somebody will find a way to steal their product, so their current policy is good enough.

[bfarber]

There is no way to only encode files a hacker would hack - if we knew which files a hacker could get in through, patches would be released to fix those holes. ;) They can get in through any file if there was an exploit in that file.

Modification authors would find this largely unappealing - you wouldn't be able to customize much of the board if we did this. Although for 3.x we want to introduce a much more robust plugin/hook type system that would allow for many more modifications not needing to edit source files.

[Dark Phantom]

There is no way to only encode files a hacker would hack - if we knew which files a hacker could get in through, patches would be released to fix those holes. ;) They can get in through any file if there was an exploit in that file.

Modification authors would find this largely unappealing - you wouldn't be able to customize much of the board if we did this. Although for 3.x we want to introduce a much more robust plugin/hook type system that would allow for many more modifications not needing to edit source files.

I realized after I made my suggestion, that no matter what method you use, you would have to make a reference to it. So they could just delete the reference and it wouldn't know the difference.

[Majdi 2.1]

you dont you encode files and create a plugin system which support 3rd party plugins?
isnt that a good idea

[Guest]

the moment ips starts zending ipb I leave.

[Antony]

I see no reason why some files (that modification authors shouldn't touch anyway) such as the IPS Kernel and various files such as the component loaders, etc. That said, encoding also seems fairly pointless - at the end of the day piracy is virtually impossible to stop.

[Majdi 2.1]

its not about piracy
it will help redusing hackers attack because they wont be able to analyse the source anymore

[Dark Phantom]

its not about piracy

it will help redusing hackers attack because they wont be able to analyse the source anymore

The hackers that are good enough to find the security holes, can decode zend encoded files I am sure.

Plus if they encode all the files, how are we going to be able to customize parts.

Although the funny thing is, most of the problems people have ARE because of hacks :-)

[OverDriveAdamJ]

I simply will not use a system that is Zend or anything else encoded. A lot of people REALLY care about seeing the sourcecode of the website software they purchase because to a much lesser extent than desktop software, in websites they are integrating it into their existing systems or making changes to suit their specific site.

Even with the "hooks" in >3.0 of IPB, someone has to see the sourcecode to make use of these hooks when authoring components that integrate into the components and plugins and modules systems of the IPB software and how much do you want to bet that at least one person with this "code" is going to relese the NULLified copy you see on warez sites from it. It's an utterly simple matter to grep for a specific phrase in a file and remove it and the new line it was on, so adding the registered owners "customer id" is a useless practice to those pirating it.

As much as you may hate to admit it... Piracy is as inevitable as the sunset every night. Zend encoding to stop it will only harm the legitimate users--as has been the trend for most anti-piracy schemes like DRM and flat out encrypting the software. The determined few who do it for the joy of it or just for the knowledge that they did it, or simply just dont have the money but do have the skill will always find a way around it.