JUD STEPHENSON  Comments like the one below can only make me laugh.

First - KIDDAILEY is talking as if he/she/whoever is a developer, and judging by the comments made about the widget, he/she is obviously not.

Second - The Widget in no way sends "the DIRECT output" of any request to the sparkIt.php page, and if KIDDAILEY was a developer, he/she would have known that.

The "invalid username/password" error message is displayed if the widget can't access the internet (just because I haven't done much work with the original error handling).

Anyone is free to take a look at the code and even run the widget in dashcode, as the image url is sent to the debug window, which makes for easy debugging.

I really feel like claims of malicious activity should have a little more backing before you (KIDDAILEY) resort to posting negative comments about my work.

If anyone has any other questions/concerns, feel free to comment over at my blog at JudStephenson.com  (Version 2.0)

KIDDAILEY  I blocked the outgoing request to the developer's site and it won't login to Google, saying "invalid username and password" even though I am copying/pasting my login info and can login from my browser with the same just fine.

This made me nervous, so I took a peek at the source code.

It doesn't appear to be doing anything malicious (though I'm not entirely sure), but it does send the DIRECT output of a Google Adsense request to a dynamic PHP script on the author's website!

The sparkIt.php script on the author's site in turn generates an image from Google's output, and the image on the author's site is directly linked to in the Widget.

I'm not comfortable with this because I have no idea what Google is sending in the output that is then sent to the author. Not to mention that it gives the author the ability to aggregate data from my account.

I personally won't use any app that sends personal data to a third-party service for parsing like this.  (Version 2.0)

JUD STEPHENSON  The widget is not 'phoning home', it was only a problem with the DNS resolving to judson.biz, which has been fixed. The widget ONLY sends dollar amounts to judstephenson.com/sparkIt.php, which in turn creates a dynamic image so you get the pretty graph at the bottom. There is NO personal information being collected.

for more help/questions visit http://bs.judstephenson.com/bbpress

Jud,

JudStephenson.com  (Version 1.1)

JUD STEPHENSON  If you click on deny forever, does it keep the graph from showing? I am wondering if it is showing judson.biz, since judson.biz and judstephenson.com are on the same server.  (Version 1.0)