views:

29

answers:

2

hey guys i have written a small webservice which allows users of a company (lets call it xyz) to login to xyz's website remotely via my iphone app (without ever going on xyz's official website to login)

after logging these users programatically to xyz's website, i can allow my users to do many authenticated tasks xyz offers

since xyz does not offer apis for this i was forced to hijack xyz's login cookies from my webservice to allow users to use all the authenticated features

at no point of time am i saving xyz users username or password and use https for my webservice to ensure safety n security of users


however i have got an email from xyz asking me to shut down my webservice otherwise face legal action. if i do that my users would be very unhappy to loose so many cool features of my iphone app


i wanted to know the best way to host my webservice on some offshore server which has elastic / dynamic ip addresses with completely different patters (so xyz cant block a particular range of ips or even domain names)

i have heard amazon provides elastic ips - can they be used for such scenario

or can someone help me come out with a better solution

webservice is asp.net 3.5 based

A: 

Looks like you are asking for help on doing illegal things. Not a smart thing to do on something as public as this.

Best advice I can give is bite the bullet and take your service down.

tdammers
its not illegal :-) lets look at it this way - its in a way similar to a twitter client - only difference twitter has official apis where as xyz does not provide any apis... illegal would be to misuse users credentials or hack their passwords
Raj
But if they're threatening legal action, how is having a dynamic IP going to help? If your iPhone app is on the App Store, they'll still be able to find you! Unless your application is so great it's worth going to court over, it looks like you should give up.
Graham Clark
+1  A: 

You should negotiate with them and find out what they don't like about your service.

You can then modify it to be friendlier to them.


Alternatively, you can get rid of your webservice and connect to their control panel directly from the iPhone.

SLaks
had to connect to their control panel directly via iphone... had no other choice... thanks for your time
Raj