Christoph,
I take great exception to your untrue claims that we tried to hack into your computer. That is most certainly NOT the case. Why would we be so stupid as to try and hack into a computer using a real (as opposed to s spoofed) IP address with a proper domain name?
To justify your claim, why not post the details of our supposed hacking attempt here so everyone can analyze it. All that your firewall probably shows is a single attempt to do a lookup on your IP address to see what was at the other end of it (a web server). Obviously, you are also monitoring IP access to your web server!
What you seem to be avoiding addressing is that it was *YOU* that tried to breach *OUR* web server by entering a bunch of page and file names in an attempt to find a product (Visual UML version 3.0) that is not available, rather than using the download link (to Visual UML version 2.9) that you were provided with! While that may not be hacking, it is certainly not appropriate.
As for logging your activities and your IP address. I doubt that there is a web site in existence that does not have a statistics package that builds reports of visitors activities, including what was accessed, when, IP address, referrer, and so on. There is nothing illegal about this. It is not unusual for a company to request a customer's details (name, company, address, email address, etc.) when they want to download a trial product. That is not illegal. Cross referencing the two is hardly rocket science! Your personal information has not been provided (by us) to any third party so we have not broken any laws.
Any web site reporting package will list page view errors, successful downloads, failed downloads and a lot more besides. This is not spying and this is not illegal (if it were then Web Trends and Statistics Server would not be in business!)
Had you not attempted to access pages that were not there you would not have appeared in the page view error log. By looking at this log we can detect if someone has been trying to get to areas of our web site that do not exist or that are protected. Anyone that runs a web server has this capability.
Analogy! If you don't want to be videotaped trying to break into a store, don't try to break into a store! If you do try, then don't complain if the store owner tries to protect himself!
We did not block your IP address from our server. I have no idea how you arrived at that (incorrect) conclusion. It is possible that you tried to access our server while it was offline during the night being upgraded.
So, all in all, you have made a number of incorrect accusations against us, in public. You are publicly denouncing our customer service when all that was done was to email you to tell you that we did not appreciate your attempts to breach *our* web server.
I felt it appropriate to present our side of the story. But, I will not be further monitoring this thread so feel free to cast as many asperisions and make as many accusations as you want. Our existing customers know how dedicated we are to the product and that our customer service and support is excellent (we did not make the stuff up on our Testimonials page!) so we have nothing to fear from you.
Lastly, why have you dragged Markus Egger and a chunk of the VFP community into this petty squabble?
Rob Pritt,
Visual Object Modelers