Pay-Site Password Protection

[gmr324]

Hi Allan,

We appreciate you checking out Phantom Frog. You
have my cell phone / ICQ / email information. Please feel
free to contact me over the weekend and we'll get you
lined up with the FREE Trial or the full production version
to solve your immediate problem. I've notified the owner/
developer Bill to be on the lookout for your Trial request.


Many Thanks

George@PhantomFrog.com
ICQ: 226948212

[raymor]

Raymor...i purchased a copy for my site www.dixter.com. But it's saying that it's going to take three days to set it up. I'm experiencing some password hacking/sharing as i'm writing this! Is there anyway so set it up right away? Please let me know would really appreciate it. Thanks

Allan

I think the message says it could be up to 2-3 days.
For the last eight months or so, since Ali joined us, most installations are done
the same day if they are ordered by 5 PM, or the next day otherwise.
Anyway, it's already done on your site.

[raymor]

Allan,
That level of resolution is unique
to Phantom Frog (yes Ray, it was worth mentioning).

George, don't be an asshole. I've been very nice to you, even as you repeatedly
commited criminal acts against us and the webmaster community at large.
I haven't even responded to your BS by telling your three "dirty little secrets" about
your "Geo-IP" and why it's "unique", which of course means you guys are the only
ones crazy enough to rely on that mess. I think I'm still being very nice by keeping
this stuff to myself, so don't push me by deliberating being an asshole.
You know, I think, that if you really insist on continuing to try to piss me off all I'd
need to do is send the URLs of a couple of these posts to "MM" and they'd
file suit in federal court immediately, which would be the end of your company.
Play nice man, I have.

[gmr324]

Is Strongbox the best (and only?) answer?

Ray,

I was responding to an open request for information
about password protection systems. The operative phrase
in Allan's request above is "(and only)" meaning are
there other viable alternatives to Strongbox. Allan
is entitled to receive meaningful information on all
his options in a professional and timely manner. In
fact, I'd be doing Allan a disservice by not responding.

We are firm believers that webmasters should make
well-informed decisions by visiting all the respective
sites that deal with website security systems. In fact,
we encourage webmasters to run a Free side-by-side
comparison of Phantom Frog with their current system and
let Frog sell itself. I don't see any other people
making that open-ended offer to the webmaster community.

I am not going to dignify your name-calling by responding
to it because such primitive retort and demeanor speaks for
itself. The webmaster community which represents our client
base is passionate and exceedingly satisfied with our system.
My only concern is the adjectives that our clients and
prospective clients use to describe me and Frog. They
represent the "true judges" here.

Phantom Frog has been in business for over 4 years and will
continue to grow and extend our reputation and market
penetration as a leading-edge solution for password protection.
As such, I will continue to post information and educate
people about Frog every opportunity I get. Being aware of
how innovative, reliable, and effective Frog is in password
protection, it would be a "criminal act" for me not to spread
the word!

[raymor]

Allan
is entitled to receive meaningful information on all
his options in a professional and timely manner.

George I have no problem with you posting. You've posted in every single thread
where someone has mentioned Strongbox on any of at least a dozen boards and
I've never had a problem with that. We have already discussed the issue many of
those posts had with respect to knowingly misleading webmasters by making false
statements about people you apparently perceive as "competitors", but I see you've
edited your standard post to take of that, so that's great, post all you want.

I may have misunderstood your intent, but to me the part where you made a point to
call me out by my name struck me as you just trying to be a jerk. If I'm wrong about
that I apologize. There's no need to add in extra comments to me that don't tell webmasters
anything and are just said to be rude. In fact it has already cost you at least one
sale that I know of. As you know, I used to speak highly of your software, calling
Phantom Frog the only other good option besides Strongbox. I talked about working
together and mentioned your company to webmasters who called me with some issue
that they hoped Strongbox could solve. When there was a clear legal issue with your
posts, I contacted you privately several times in an attempt to resolve it. In short, I
was very nice to you because I don't see you as competition. I see two companies
working toward the same goal of stopping theives and helping secure web sites.
That's how I'd like things to continue to be, and it makes it hard for me to keep doing
that if you post snide little comments that have nothing to do with helping webmasters,
but are said just to try to pick a fight or be annoying.

As I said, I'd like to continue to say nice things about your product and to mention
you to webmasters for whom Strongbox may not be the best choice or who I frankly
just don't have time to deal with. On the other hand, if you REALLY want to start posting
snide little comments 10 times a day just trying to be a pain in the ass, please think
about how that could turn out. I am familiar with your product. I'm VERY familiar
with geo tracking. I'm familiar with the companies involved, with their license agreements,
and with their registered trademarks. I sincerely hope you can read between the lines
here. If you choose to piss people off just for the fun of it, they may eventually get
tired of it and take five minutes to make a phone call that could create very big
problems for your company, so let's not go there, OK?

[gmr324]

Ray,

I think you took my side comment the wrong way. In
a recent post on another board, you made a remark
that I forgot to mention the word "unique". Well, I
found that to be fairly comical and was just returning
the favor. So, "yes, Ray it was worth mentioning"
should be taken in that light ().

We've both got better things to be doing than
verbally jousting since there are still webmasters
out there using IP Counting systems. So let's
put this same energy into making a dent there!
Furthermore, we have a common enemy in hackers
who seem to never take a day off or a vacation!

Regards,

George

[gaybucks_chip]

I have no experience with Phantom Frog, and although George has invited us to try his product, we've honestly felt no need to do so.

I have a fair amount of experence with Pennywise and now with Strongbox. I have no financial incentive or interest in any password protection product, I'm just a technogeek that does my best to learn about and understand issues that relate to my business as best I can in this complex and fast-moving world.

All geoIP information used by any company for any purpose is licensed from one of several companies, and can only be as reliable as the data provided. I've spent a fair amount of time looking into the geoIP issue and underlying technologies to try to gain some understanding of it and how it impacts things like password protection as well as for some other applications we are looking into for future projects.

Honestly, I believe selling geo IP as the end-all for password protection is a case of marketing hype, in much the same way that UltraDNS relies on ignorance about how DNS works to try to sell their service that is unnecessary for most webmasters.

Geo IP tracking is useful for some things, but is far from accurate in many places outside the US as well as many places in the US. It cannot accurately account for things like AOL's proxy-based network, IP anonymizing setups such as TOR and the many other proxy networks, and many similar things, and it is simply wrong a significant portion of the time for a variety of reasons having to do with the way in which existing IP addressing technology works.

While geo IP may be one tool that can potentially be helpful in some circumstances, I think that representing it as a universal panacea in the fight against password sharing, brute force attacks, site ripping, and other forms of content theft is substantially overstating its value, given the inherent shortcomings in the technology as it currently exists. Perhaps that will change if and when IPv6 (a new IP addressing scheme) ever becomes universal, but that appears to be years away.

From talking to Ray about the technology behind Strongbox, and from my own research, I believe that Strongbox has taken into account pretty much all of the potential exploits possible, and addressed ways to prevent them using a more integrated, comprehensive strategy than any other product out there, at least based on what I've been able to find from published information on the major products in the marketplace.

I'm sure that Ray could very easily license geo IP technology and integrate it into Strongbox if he felt it would meaningfully improve the performance of the product, but from my conversations with him on this issue and what I know of the limitations of geo IP technology, I simply don't see that the benefits it would offer are significant enough to warrant its addition to the existing technologies that Strongbox uses to protect membership websites, and the last thing I need is erroneous blocking (either false positive or negative) based on inaccurate geo IP data.

For me, the decision to adopt a techology offered by a given company is in part driven by the technology itself, but in part also how the company markets itself. Of course, every company has to play to its strengths in the marketplace, but when a company is marketing a product against another product without fairly disclosing the limitations of the technology used while at the same time implying it is superior, it simply strikes me as disingenuous, and, for me at least, tends to push me in the direction of using another company's technology.

I'm sure that Phantom Frog and Strongbox (as well as ProxyPass, another major player) all have their individual advantages and disadvantages, and that the webmasters using each product are happy with their choice.

I just wish that companies involved in using marketing hype would instead simply market their products honesty and fairly.

[raymor]

George I apologize then, it seems I took your comment entirely the wrong way.
I had entirely forgotten about the joking comment I posted. Indeed we do have
much more important things to do. I'm half tempted to mention some of the cool new
stuff we're working on, but I know if it was a good idea you guys would likely take
the initiative and run with it, and probably do a pretty good job of it to.

[basschick]

George - sometimes our members travel and use their login in different locations - like l.a. and new york. one guys who is a member of our site has accessed our site from several countries as he travels for a living. and i myself have used both earthlink and att to access sites when i review them. also i review for some review sites who have me go in and do the review, then later the owner logs in to take the screencaps.

i guess what i'm saying here is that sometimes allowing only one location per member can keep legitimate members from accessing what they paid for, and other times it can keep your site from being reviewed...

how flexible is your program regarding being able to allow more than one ip per user?

[gmr324]

Hi basschick,

how flexible is your program regarding being
able to allow more than one ip per user?

Quite to the contrary, Phantom Frog anticipates and factors
in travel by members. So, for example, let's say a trucker
member signed into your site at 10 AM in Boston, signed out
at 10:30 AM. He then drove his truck to NY City for 4 hours
and signed in again at 2:30 PM.

Frog tracks those visits and city locations and allows for
possibility of human travel thereby making those accesses legit.
If however, that second access at 2:30 PM came from LA,
Frog will flag that as abuse since that can't be attributed to
human travel time (unless you're George Jetson!).

Now, in Frog's admin control panel, the webmaster has the
ability to override/adjust settings so that abuse detections
for a particular account can be ignored. This would enable
you to allow more than one IP to be logged in simultaneously
where your circumstance necessitates it. I would direct you
to our sample screenshots which can be viewed here:

http://phantomfrog.com/Life-Cycle-1.html (bottom right corner)

Hopefully, this addresses your question.

In our FREE Trial, the Geo-IP Tracking feature is demonstrated
and abuse reports are generated. You can also look at all
the admin screenshots as well. However, the buttons are
disabled.

[Pistol]

http://pennywize.com/

[Alex_Manifest_M]

We were interested in Strongbox but were told it would not work on our servers so we went with BlackBox instead and have been pretty happy with the results.

[Baghdad Bob]

i have not used any of them sorry

[hdkbill]

We use Strongbox on our site. Hot Desert Knights Couldn't be happier.

Yes you do have to type in a code each time, but it's simple, we've never had a complaint and it keeps the bots out.

It's inexpensive and it works. And, it works good.

Bill

But doesn't Strongbox have that really annoying feature where you have to enter the "code" in the box every time you enter the member's area? like what you see on this site http://www.shanesixty.com/memberslounge/

or is there a way not to have that feature?

can you guys point me to some other sites that also use Strongbox? Just want to see what the setup looks like.

thanks

allan