Perl.com Taken over by Domain Squatters

It hosted cperl and rperl, which are important. Perl5, as you might not know is not developed anymore, it's only maintained into oblivion, getting worse and worse over time. 20 years no new features, only design mistakes over mistakes piling up. perl11 provided the continuation of Perl development, but the maintainers in their tunnel vision do not agree (yet). Almost everything they did in the last 6 years came from cperl, but it's still only 10%.

Now it's on perl11.github.io

When the squatters give up, fine, but GitHub served us well over the years. Better than everyone else, esp. Google.

How appropriate, in 2001 I was trapped with both and then some (Oracle), and I'm so glad I can now choose to be in the presence of neither.

Back then I did devops for a moderately sized stocks platform with real time ticks and charting, the works. We had two large code bases, one in perl, one in Java.

They both were bad times.

Java, because the java coders didn't quite understand how threading worked, leaking all over the place. My job was to migrate the systems from AIX 64bit machines (that could deal with the memory leaks with only one restart per hour) to x86 Linux. It was kind of fun (because everything was pretty contained) until the stuff went into production, and the servlets died after 4-5 requests each under non synthetic load.

And Perl, because the perl coders thought it was of benefit to write code that nobody could read but the author, and that it was OK to have dependencies on very old and very new libraries at the same time.

I gotta admit, the Perl stuff ran more stable. But it was still hell to upgrade the machines or debug even the smallest issues.

> How would you prevent a group from trolling or performing a hostile takeover of a small domain?

Several ways.

If you are accessing the domain locally, you'd normally be looking for entries that match the private key you have stored. So if you ever went to that domain, you'll get the same remote again.

If this is your first time accessing the domain, you'd ask your peers what version of the domain they have stored. Those aren't randomly assigned, but people you know IRL, similar to Freenet. You could do some degree of onion routing if you care about keeping sites you go to private from your friends. And again, you'd only do it the first time. And this is hard to attack because you can't make a person have friends in the WOT graph.

When you are following a link, the person placing the link could always just attach the full private key to the link tag.

If you are copying a URL from your browser bar, the browser could attach a random set of index-value pairs of the private key. This would be very hard to spoof, but not increase the size of the URL by much. That would cover you for posting links in forums and chat rooms.

Of course if you were searching for the domain, your first hit would almost certainly have the correct key.

Only if you are told the URL through an out-of-band source, and almost nobody you know (transitively) has gone to that domain, you are in the situation of having to figure out which key is the true key. In that case, you could fall back to certificate checks. Note that certificates as a market are a lot more competetive than the domain name market.

So there's no one-size-fits-all solution, but just like right now, most of the time you wouldn't have to think about it. And unlike right now, if it goes wrong you get a nice error instead of silently the wrong domain.

Let’s call it what it is. It’s not a domain taken over by squatters. The domain was stolen.

I’ve seen other domains get stolen recently, it seems to be about the same time.

Patterns dot com Piracy dot com Perl dot com

All stolen at around the same time.

With patterns, the thief hacked the network solutions account, put the domain under privacy, transferred it to a Chinese registrar, and then put the old whois data back. They then tried to sell it on sedo and afternic for 10 percent of what it’s worth.

I have been able to get sedo and afternic to remove the listings. But patterns has not been returned to its owner after about two months. Still working with the owner and registrars on that.

My advice is to lock down your domains, register them for at least 5 years, and if there are changes deal with them quickly. Once a domain is transferred it’s much harder to get back. It can be done, but it’s a lot of work to unravel it all.

Uh Perl 5 is in ACTIVE development and has gotten new features. Everything you said about Perl 5 is wrong. Perl 7 (skipping Perl 6 obviously) is on the table and being talked about and Perl 5.34.0 is going to be released in a couple months setting the stage for Perl 7.