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The warning is irrelevant to the .htaccess Maker. It is simply thrown because you have disabled allow_url_fopen in your php.ini or your configuration.php file. As for your concerns, yes, that extension phones home. If it's currently listed in the Joomla! Extensions Directory, please report it. Phoning home is strictly prohibited by the JED rules. If you have paid money for it, request from the developer to immediately disable the phone home feature or give you a refund. If it's a free extension, stop using it. Phoning home has never been necessary for anything except fetching updates. Even in this case, the security principle is that the update provisioning party should not collect site-identifiable information when provisioning the updates. That why, for instance, our software only fetches an update provisioning file from a CDN, without submitting any information which could be used to identify the user or the site using our extensions. Phoning home is a nefarious practice and it's up to each one of us to make sure that it's finally extinct.