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CyanogenMod Domain Hijacked
An anonymous reader writes "The team behind CyanogenMod, one of the most popular community-driven, Android-based operating systems for phones and tablets, has announced that they're moving to Cyanogenmod.org after their .com domain was held ransom by a community member. He had been in control of the .com domain name for some time, but the team found out he was impersonating Cyanogen to make deals with community sites. When they removed his access to other parts of the CM infrastructure, he demanded $10,000 to relinquish control of the domain and threatened to change the DNS entries. When they refused to pay, he went through with it. The team is now disputing control of the domain with ICANN. They said, 'We will continue to be open about the what, when, how, but unfortunately, we may never know the "why" – though greed comes to mind. The team itself has not made a profit off of CM and that is not our goal. But to have one of our own betray the community like this is beyond our comprehension.'"
Sounds like a real asshole. Enjoy the domain why you can - it'll be taken from you, or it'll be rendered worthless when the responsible adults get their own domain. Either way it's worthless.
A real community member would be proud to shell out the 10 bucks for the domain name nenewal and donate it back to the project.
Whoever this community member is, he needs to be very very careful about what he's doing. Many countries hold that malicious hijacking of trademarks or implied trademarks to be a criminal rather than merely civil matter. Ie if you go to a company or organization and maliciously register their trademark to fuck them over, you can expect a policeman at your door with a warrant.
This happens quite regularly, and it rarely turns out as happily as the malicious party expected.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Benedict Judas Quisling is unable to take your call at this moment, but if you leave your site name he'll remove it from DNS as soon as possible.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Even just putting up a standard ad landing page would generate income, there.
We'll see if ICANN just brings down the hammer for powerful corporations here.
They did mention "filing charges". IANAL, and I doubt Steve is either. If I were in his shoes, I'd be hesitant to publish clearly identifying details until I'd consulted an attorney.
I tried going to cyanogenmod.com and got redirected to cyanogenmod.org. Maybe someone realized that what he was doing wasn't just unethical, but also most likely illegal.
This guy is in England... the country where you get arrested for posting a photo of a burning paper flower on facebook.
Yup. I'm 90% positive about who it is, but I'm not going to ask or discuss it with the rest of the team to ensure noninterference with legal proceedings.
I am, however, planning on talking with some lawyer friends on advice for setting up a 501(c)(3) organization.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Whoa... Whoops, turns out I was wrong. https://plus.google.com/u/0/103583939320326217147/posts/A8mtUUpdEH8
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Domain Name:CYANOGENMOD.ORG
Created On:21-Oct-2010 18:09:32 UTC
It's the responsibility of any person responsible for a project to ensure a backup domain(s) is available in the case the domain owner become estranged from the project.
A good example of proper planning.
This is the first whois data from that domain 3 years ago:
Administrative Contact:
Deveci, Ahmet webmaster@metserve.com
Third Floor
152-156 Lower Clapton Road
Clapton, London E5 0QJ
GB
+442081232629
Whenever the subject is brought up, it would be appropriate to NAME the perp and note his background info.
No libel, no slander, just sufficient identification that anyone considering teaming with this fellow can make a fully informed decision.
It's not revenge, just self-defense.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I only just now realized that the rom is called cyanogenmod and not cryogenmod. Christ, I've been calling it cryogenmod for over a year!
And this is why you make sure of who's listed as the registrant. Not just the administrative contact, the registrant is the one who owns the domain. You can set the billing, technical and administrative contacts to whoever needs to run things day-to-day, but make sure the registrant contact information's set for the organization, not one single person within it. That way when someone goes rogue you don't need to involve ICANN, you can just contact the registrar as the registrant and get control back. It's still hassle, but much less hassle than a dispute proceeding.
This all looks to now be resolved - http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved
From the cyanogenmod blog -
(ciwrl wrote this, I’m just posting on his behalf so this is resolved)
So earlier today we put up a post on what prompted us to transition to our new CyanogenMod.org domain. We refrained from identifying the ex-member out of respect for his privacy and career outside of CM. Suffice it to say you guys aren’t slouches, and figured it out on your own.
With that said, the ex-member in question contacted us and has agreed to hand over control of the CyanogenMod.com domain. This was done as amicably as these things can be, and CM did not pay the fee he requested.
We will still be using CyanogenMod.org as our primary domain, and the .com address will simply redirect to this new domain. Ironically enough, ‘.org’ is better than ‘.com’ as we are not a commercial entity, and is far more in line with how CyanogenMod is structured.
We received a common question, that we’d like to take a moment to answer. Some of you contacted us mentioning that you had previously donated to a different address. When the forum began, up until about 3 months ago, the forum utilized this other address as the mechanism for forum donations and establishment of the ‘Donator’ badge. Donations made to this address prior to three months ago were used for the CyanogenMod forum IPB licence and forum related costs and were not misappropriated.
On a side note, we have also gone through internal restructuring to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. Nobody has control over everything, and there is no longer such a large single-point of failure. Our lessons have been learned.
We ask that you please not perform any vigilante actions, we do not condone any such thing; just let this fade.
We want to move on, get you the builds you expect from us, and not mess around with distractions.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Yup, the CM team acknowledged the transfer to them too: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved
...not sure what the guy hoped to accomplish, but I assume he's regretting it now. Nothing gained but enmity.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms