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CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

cyanogenmod.org

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Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#81

Post by greyboy »

rplnt wrote: post #66
greyboy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read: And due to the small size (and lack of funds), the CyanogenMod.com domain was bought by a third-party back in 2009 and donated to CM, when CM was a much smaller project and had no online presence besides XDA. I must be missing something (and speaking from a US perspective), but was $10 really unattainable in order to secure a domain? Three years worth would have been $30-ish dollars now. Genuinely curious wha…

$10,000 dollars for a domain seems a bit much by itself. When you add the factor that you should have right to it and it was basically stolen.. there's no way they should pay that.

I absolutely agree, it's just unfortunate. The only domains worth that much are really rare.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#82

Post by stanleydrew »

grandpoobah wrote: post #49
streptomycin wrote: post #2

And the .org domain is already #1 in the Google search results for CyanogenMod.

How did it happen so quickly?

If search engines are indexing your site with any regularity and you kill all your DNS records I'd say it's not terribly surprising to have your domain removed. That combined with the new .org being an exact match for a "cyanogen" search would probably do it.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#83

Post by greyboy »

shardling wrote: post #52
greyboy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read: And due to the small size (and lack of funds), the CyanogenMod.com domain was bought by a third-party back in 2009 and donated to CM, when CM was a much smaller project and had no online presence besides XDA. I must be missing something (and speaking from a US perspective), but was $10 really unattainable in order to secure a domain? Three years worth would have been $30-ish dollars now. Genuinely curious wha…

I might have missed something, but it's not clear to me whether the original gifter is the person who hijacked the domain.

That's true. I made the assumption it was the same person based on:

The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won’t (and can’t) pay.

but, that could be a mistake if "owning" meant he simply took control of it at some point over the years.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#84

Post by greyboy »

kamjam wrote: post #39
greyboy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read: And due to the small size (and lack of funds), the CyanogenMod.com domain was bought by a third-party back in 2009 and donated to CM, when CM was a much smaller project and had no online presence besides XDA. I must be missing something (and speaking from a US perspective), but was $10 really unattainable in order to secure a domain? Three years worth would have been $30-ish dollars now. Genuinely curious wha…

It probably wasn't, but it was probably someone he worked with/knew pretty well/whatever and he never thought much more of it or was pretty broke and someone else offered to help him out a little. One of life's lessons and next time he (and we) won't be making the same mistake.

It's a lame situation, for sure, over what appears to be a strictly greedy or personal matter. And hindsight is alwasy 20/20. Fortunately, a good name was available and (hopefully) only an inconvience in time and effort is the major consequence (well, and all those now non-resolving links).

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#85

Post by lambda »

cdr wrote: post #40
blhack wrote: post #22

The title was NOT sensationalist, and the change here is a loss of information. They aren't "transitioning" to a .org, their domain was stolen. the .com shouldn't be trusted at this point, as it has apparently been taken over by some rogue former-team-member. edit: thanks to the mod that fixed it :)

There is, so far as I've discerned, an automated bot running that changes submission titles to the HTML title of the URL. No human intervention, no human judgment.

Nope, as you can see, they originally changed it to "Transition to CyanogenMod.org", while the HTML title of the URL is "PSA: Transition to CyanogenMod.org". Then after complaints that that change went too far, they added the "Cyanogenmod.com hijacked" part. Now the title is better than either the original title of the submission or the HTML title of the original article.

I don't think it's a bot; it's just that the policy is that if the title is misleading or sensationalist, to prefer the original title of the article over anything else. So that's what the admins go with the vast majority of the time if anyone complains. In this case, the hijacking really is relevant, so they added that part back in again.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#86

Post by JL2010 »

moheeb wrote: post #69
rplnt wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And .com completely gone? In an hour? I would say there was a human intervention. Although Bing points to .org as well...

Are you implying nobody human would work for Bing?

The implication is about the type of humans at Bing, y'know, the Microsoft type?

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#87

Post by lambda »

rplnt wrote: post #65
pja wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of links from high profile sites presumably.

And .com completely gone? In an hour? I would say there was a human intervention. Although Bing points to .org as well...

The .com site did completely disappear, and for a relatively high profile site like that, it's probably indexed pretty often.

There's also the possibility that the developers had access to the "Google Webmaster Tools" for cyanogenmod.com, even though they didn't own the domain, and so just told Google that the site had moved.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#88

Post by shardling »

greyboy wrote: post #83
shardling wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might have missed something, but it's not clear to me whether the original gifter is the person who hijacked the domain.

That's true. I made the assumption it was the same person based on: The person owning the CyanogenMod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted 10K USD for it, which we won’t (and can’t) pay. but, that could be a mistake if "owning" meant he simply took control of it at some point o…

It's slightly contradictory, because it says the original person "gave" them the domain. I at first took that to mean in all senses. But it does seem likely that if there were two different unnamed people associated with the website they would have made that distinction clear.

(The confusion could have been avoided by assigning a nym to anyone who they didn't want to name explicitly.)

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#89

Post by facorreia »

entropy_ wrote: post #79
facorreia wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was available through www.metserve.com but the site is offline now. I assume it's related. Anyway he is having a conversation with the CM team over Twitter.

Conversation... More like public poo flinging. I mean seriously? Use email or something, it's really unprofessional to "talk" these things out over twitter

I think at this point they're just trying to get him to talk anything they can add as evidence on the impending lawsuit about fraud.

Re: CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

#90

Post by gte910h »

antidoh wrote: post #54
gte910h wrote: post #30

I don't know what this is, but as the guy asked for money for the domains, which he didn't own, I'd think about asking the police to look into this being extortion.

I think he did/does own the domain, on behalf of cm. My best guess is that cm wasn't incorporated, so a human body had to own it. The human body then went full asshat.

Sorry, I thought the transfer looked more administrative.

If the accused asshat actually paid for the domains at all, that's a whole nother story as they say.

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