Hi all. If you ever thought about buying the SourceGuardian software to encrypt or protect your code, then please think again, or better yet, DON'T BUY IT! Let me tell you about my horrifying experience with this "company". So I buy the software, so far so good. Here's the receipt for it: SourceGuardian Invoice and Registration Code -------------------------------------------- A printable copy of the invoice/receipt is available within your profile as a PDF download. -------------------------------------------- Invoice number: SG0907563402 For the purchase of 1 copy of SourceGuardian Total Cost: $199 (Above cost is inclusive of 15% VAT if within the EU) Shipped from: Inovica Ltd (Trading as SourceGuardian) Suite 20, Quay Level St. Peters Wharf Newcastle Upon Tyne NE6 1TZ United Kingdom email: sales@phpguardian.com In their automated email reply they give me a username and password to log in to their website and download the software. So I download the software from their website, which says it's SourceGuardian 7.1 I install it and to my surprise everything reads SourceGuardian 7.0 They also provide an install/check script which can be downloaded for free from their website which is called howto-install.php After installing everything and running that script again, it returns this message: Old SourceGuardian loader is already installed, you need to upgrade it to latest version. ...weird, since everything was downloaded from their website, where they claim it's the latest version and the latest loaders. root@wbox:/work/sg-full/bin# ./sginfo -v SourceGuardian 7.0 Information Tool (Oct 24 2006 23:23:09) Copyright (c) 2000-2006 Inovica Ltd. But I say OK, no big deal as long as it works like it should. So I encode one php file and encoding it works, so I think it's all good. Being a software provider myself and affiliated with 3 hosting companies I advertise on my website, I ask them to install the loaders on their servers so that I can do some tests. Here are the results: - one hosting company, shared servers, x86_64 architecture, x86_64 loaders: Apache SEGMENTATION FAULT when trying to access the encrypted file. - same hosting company, dedicated servers, x86_64 architecture, x86_64 loaders: Apache SEGMENTATION FAULT when trying to access the encrypted file. - different hosting company, shared servers, x86_64 architecture, x86_64 loaders: Apache SEGMENTATION FAULT when trying to access the encrypted file. - private test server, i686 architecture, x86_32 loaders, all good when trying to access the encrypted file. - hosting company private test server, i686 architecture, x86_32 loaders, all good when trying to access the encrypted file. Ok, weird. So after spending countless hours of talking, trying, debugging, enabling, disabling, reconfiguring, pretty much everything we could think of, the result would always be the same, segmentation fault, so we've all come to the conclusion that the problem has to be with the loaders they provide. How comes the fun part. So I say OK, let's contact them and see what's going on. Of course they have no ticketing system and no forum, which was pretty suspicious to start with, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt I say to myself. All they have is a stupid contact form on their website. So I write them, being very polite, and I explain the entire thing to them. I wait...one day, two days, nothing, no reply... So I write them again, again being very polite and kindly asking them to look into my situation and provide some solution or at least an answer. So I wait, one day, two days, three days, not one word from them.... Now I'm really mad and write them again threatening them with a refund. I wait, one day, almost two days, then I finally get a reply from them which literally shocked me: "Hi there! This is SourceGuardian support, it seems you are unable to receive emails from us, so we are trying google. Your support request was answered in 15 minutes by myself. I sent this: "Did you tried to run encoded script on this machine? What do you see? What URL? Can you send phpinfo() output link to us also. " Kind Regards Sergey Egorov Customer Service Dept. www.sourceguardian.com" So after a full week they tell me they answered within 15 minutes of my first message but I'm unable to receive emails from them? I've exchanged THOUSANDS of emails with that account, NOT ONCE in YEARS has there been any problem of that nature, but all of a sudden their emails are not getting to me? Come on!! That's the biggest BS I've ever heard. Not only that, but their stupid reply has nothing to do with what I actually asked in the first place. But I say to myself, OK, let's try and see if we can actually work something out. So I write back within 30 minutes of their reply, giving them the phpinfo() link like they wanted. Now I'm "tailing" the web server access_log to see when they access the phpinfo() link: tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log ...and I wait, one day, two days, three days....the phpinfo() link has NEVER been accessed in 3 days and the web server access_log clearly proves it, today being the third day. At this point it's obvious to me I've been scammed, so I've contacted my bank to obtain a full refund of the payment made to them. So I let you judge based on my experience if it is worth buying SourceGuardian or not. Thank you all for your time!