Methlabs website hijacked
Just to warn any PeerGuardian users out there that the project’s website – methlabs.org – has been hijacked. Apparently the guy who was in charge of their accounts and webhosting (William Erwin according to Slyck) transferred the domain to himself and drained the donations account. He then proceeded to kick everyone else off the server. There is a story on Methlabs’ wordpress-powered homepage saying that
To update everyone on the current situation, there has been some news going around the Internet of a revolt which happened in Methlabs. The current news is that PeerGuardian development and Blocklist development is on schedule, and Blocklist should be out of Beta within the next week or so.
Please spread the word that Methlabs.org is ALIVE and DO NOT believe or TRUST any emails that do not come directly from Methlabs.org and our mail servers. These emails are from disgruntled staff members.
however the three main P2P news sites (P2PNet, Slyck and Suprnova) have all confirmed that the story is indeed genuine, and that Erwin’s site is not to be trusted.
The legitimate Methlabs team have set up at SourceForge where they have posted instructions on how to secure PeerGuardian against any nastiness that Erwin might try (since the current version of PeerGuardian is coded to use the stolen site for auto-updates – I don’t have to tell you what kind of havoc that could cause). They also have a press release informing users of the situation:
The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the website’s assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff.
The organisation’s founders, Tim Leonard and Ken McKelland, as well as the majority of the organisation’s staff and developers (including the main developer of the PeerGuardian2 application, Cory Nelson and the staff members responsible for auditing the PeerGuardian Blocklists) have all been forcibly removed from the servers that were funded from donations given to the organisation by happy users, and from text advertising placed on the websites forum and project pages.
The money, which was to have been used to help fund the development and hosting costs of the group is now unavailable, stolen by the one who was trusted to keep it.
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