There's an odd little application that's been brought up that's written in PHP with one purpose - obfuscating an email address/HTML so it's very difficult for a spambot (or other harvesting program) to get a hold of the content and add to its list. The Obfuscator takes in an email address and, with the click a button, spits back out the obfusicated code.

They're also offering the source for the application so you can get behind the scenes and see how it works. It definitely does a good job at making things more difficult, but I'm not sure how useful it really is in practice. If you're just using it to drop into a one-time kind of location, it would work, but the results this thing spits out would be a nightmare to maintain (especially the HTML).

One good thing, though, is that too the user, it all looks seamless. There's no funny characters or things they'd have to change in their browser to get it to work.

There's an odd little application that's been brought up that's written in PHP with one purpose - obfuscating an email address/HTML so it's very difficult for a spambot (or other harvesting program) to get a hold of the content and add to its list. The Obfuscator takes in an email address and, with the click a button, spits back out the obfusicated code.

They're also offering the source for the application so you can get behind the scenes and see how it works. It definitely does a good job at making things more difficult, but I'm not sure how useful it really is in practice. If you're just using it to drop into a one-time kind of location, it would work, but the results this thing spits out would be a nightmare to maintain (especially the HTML).

One good thing, though, is that too the user, it all looks seamless. There's no funny characters or things they'd have to change in their browser to get it to work.

There's always been several PHP developers out there looking to protect the source that they so lovingly crafted. They look for alternatives to keeping it safe, but sometimes it's just not enough. In this new post on the Sjon.Blog today, he mentions some of the frustrations he's had already with exectly this.

Zend almost convinced me that their Safeguard Suite really secured your PHP scripts. Ofcourse I know that scripts need to be interpreted and executed and are therefore never 100% safe; but I expected some form of obfuscation and rewriting to prevent this. This doesn't seem to be the case though. I have had a look at PHP Obfuscator/Obscurer, but a good illustration of the quality of that script can be illustrated with a simple, readable example.

Also, obfuscating React took me almost an hour; which isn’t that strange when you have had a look at the sourcecode.

As far as I've heard/seen so far, there's not really a good solution to this dilema. Sure, some are better than others, but there's still a hole there that is just waiting to be filled with an application anyone can use...

There's always been several PHP developers out there looking to protect the source that they so lovingly crafted. They look for alternatives to keeping it safe, but sometimes it's just not enough. In this new post on the Sjon.Blog today, he mentions some of the frustrations he's had already with exectly this.

Zend almost convinced me that their Safeguard Suite really secured your PHP scripts. Ofcourse I know that scripts need to be interpreted and executed and are therefore never 100% safe; but I expected some form of obfuscation and rewriting to prevent this. This doesn't seem to be the case though. I have had a look at PHP Obfuscator/Obscurer, but a good illustration of the quality of that script can be illustrated with a simple, readable example.

Also, obfuscating React took me almost an hour; which isn’t that strange when you have had a look at the sourcecode.

As far as I've heard/seen so far, there's not really a good solution to this dilema. Sure, some are better than others, but there's still a hole there that is just waiting to be filled with an application anyone can use...