One thing I love to do is to investigate different wordpress themes. I love it! I love the ideas that people share with each other and the different layouts, colours etc. Its always an inspiration to view all the different aspects and ideas.

Recently, I downloaded this one theme, that I was considering adapting for a friends blog and lo and behold it had something evil in the footer or should I say eval.

This is the code in the footer:

<?php $_F=__FILE__;$_X='Pz4JPGQ0diA0Z...rubbish
...=';eval(base64_decode('JF9YPWJhc2U2NF9kZWNvZGUoJ etc rubbish

It worried me a little, then I laughed, because I thought of how you can’t really stop people from decoding or stealing your work (not that I advocate this!) if they really, really want to. You can however make it harder or as most people see it more challenging.

I began my quest on the internet. I found some sites that warned against using themes with base 64 code as they may contain malicious attacks, scripts etc. Then I thought, why not find out what it actually says before freaking out.

This site helped: http://danilo.ariadoss.com/decoding-_f__file___x-eval-base64_decode/

As did this: http://www.tareeinternet.com/scripts/byterun.php

So after running the evil script through the decoder (which took a second) I found that it basically was running a script and that script was to stop people from removing credits from the bottom. Which is fine. I don’t have a problem with that as nothing annoys me more than people STEALING – bad!

This is just a post to help you investigate what codes a theme is using and making sure that there is nothing malicious in an encrypted footer.php page. This in no way advocates removing of authors credits.

The other day I was going through my activity logs on my server and discovered that there have been people downloading vast amounts of my images and source code etc! First I was angry – you know how dare they! Then I was determined to stop them… so I began searching for ways that would stop them. Quite fruitless to be honest as I discovered you can make it harder but not stop them completely and if people want to be unethical and steal stuff then they are going to do it no matter what I do to stop them.

During my research, I stumbled on this website: http://www.drpeterjones.com/hidden/hidden.php where the author basically said, the harder you make it for people to copy, the harder they will try and gave a very interesting example. Took me a little while to “crack it” but I did in the end and the crazy thing was that it was a easy as he said it was. After I had cracked his code, a light shone and I went “ahhh so easy!!” and had a bit of a giggle.

So basically I have come to the conclusion that I should be flattered that people want to steal my stuff (what the!?!), but if you think that my work is good enough to pinch, the least you could do is leave a comment telling me how much you enjoy looking at my work!

The new look Brendan B Photography website has been rolled out!!

Not much has changed for those of you have visited the site previously, except it has become more polished and sleek. It still features the same easy to navigate menu and gallery, and the mailto link has been upgraded to a contact form, which of course thanks the user for taking the time to send an email.

The new Peninsula Hapkido website has been rolled out!!

There isn’t much content yet, just a home page and a contact page, but its slowly filling up with more content soon The form has also been updated to thank the person that submitted it, which is quickly becoming an AllyKatDesign trademark for  contact forms.

Its good to see the new layout up and running finally!

Stay tuned for more updates.