15 ms·

CyanogenMod.com hijacked. Transition to CyanogenMod.org

381 points by saket123 14y ago

streptomycin 14y ago
And the .org domain is already #1 in the Google search results for CyanogenMod.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Just checked on DuckDuckGo - #1 as well.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- grandpoobah 14y ago
  How did it happen so quickly?
  - pja 14y ago
    A lot of links from high profile sites presumably.
    - rplnt 14y ago
      And .com completely gone? In an hour? I would say there was a human intervention. Although Bing points to .org as well...
      - moheeb 14y ago
        Are you implying nobody human would work for Bing?
        JL2010 14y ago
        The implication is about the type of humans at Bing, y'know, the Microsoft type?
        rplnt 14y ago
        No, just that the chance of human involvement for two major search engines within an hour seems lower.
      - lambda 14y ago
        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.
  - stanleydrew 14y ago
    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.
    - Achshar 14y ago
      It looks more likely that someone form the search team browses HN or uses Cyanogen (very likely) and they intervened and updated the index manually. I am sure google has a back-end to do stuff manually.
- timothya 14y ago
  It's the #1 on Bing and DuckDuckGo as well, though interestingly you can still see links in the .com in both Bing and DuckDuckGo results, but Google has eliminated the .com completely from their results.
bronson 14y ago
It seems a nice idea, buying the CM.com domain and donating it to the project. Wonder if this sleazeball had a change of heart, or was he planning on embezzling referral traffic the whole time?
- greyboy 14y ago
  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 what led up to this scenario.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - kamjam 14y ago
    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.
    - greyboy 14y ago
      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).
      - kamjam 14y ago
        Glad to read the story that all has been resolved now! :)
  - 14y ago
lambda 14y ago
Title is sensationalist. Should be something like "Transition to Cyanogenmod.org"; Cyanogenmod is not offline, just cyanogenmod.com Google already give you cyanogenmod.org when you search for cyanogenmod. Was this always their preferred domain, or is Google just that quick to update? Post on cyanogenmod.org for those who prefer not to use Facebook: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmod-org http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmo... For the sake of posterity, the original title was "Cyanogenmod taken offline by developer", and the link was to the same story, but posted on Facebook.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - lambda 14y ago
    Sensationalist because it is false, and misleads you in a way that makes you believe this is a bigger deal than it actually is. Nothing is offline. All that has changed is the domain. "Cyanogenmod" is not offline. "cyanogenmod.com" is offline, but everything that was there is at "cyanogenmod.org" so even saying "cyanogenmod.com is offline" would be misleading. Also, the "taken offline by developer" part is patently false. The website was taken offline by someone who donated the domain name, and is now using it to try and make affiliate deals and extort the developer. Really, there is an actually interesting story here. The title could be "cyanogenmod.com hijacked by rogue admin"; that is just as interesting, and actually true. Almost nothing about "Cyanogenmod taken offline by developer" is true.
    - marshray 14y ago
      Looks to me like a lot of search results return cyanogenmod.com, which suggests that many bookmarks are now broken.
      - lambda 14y ago
        I'm not saying that this isn't a big deal. I'm saying that the headline is false. It implies that Cyanogenmod itself has been taken down by its developer. That is not true at all. The domain name has been taken down by the person who donated in the first place, and is now trying to make a quick buck off of it. Sure, bookmarks may break. Yes, it's an important story. But Cyanogenmod has not been taken offline by its developer.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Jeraimee 14y ago
Can we get a title change here. This title is not only wrong but just worded to grab attention.
- shardling 14y ago
  How is it wrong? Their original website was taken offline by a (now former) developer, forcing them to change domains. Seems like the title is perfectly accurate.
  - zetx 14y ago
    It's confusing at the very least. "CyanogenMod [domain] taken offline by developer" vs "CyanogenMod [project] taken offline by developer"
    - bmasci 14y ago
      This. My first thought was that CM was no longer available. I did not think anything of the domain.
    - janus 14y ago
      Obligatory reference http://xkcd.com/932/ http://xkcd.com/932/
    - lambda 14y ago
      And it wan't by a developer. It was by a rogue admin. "By developer" implies that it was done by one of the core Cyanogenmod developers, perhaps even Cyanogen himself.
  - jeffool 14y ago
    Because the title doesn't say "the website" was taken offline. It suggests CyanogenMod itself is no longer available from the developer. Imagine the headline "LA Lakers Closes!" That tells me the basketball team is no more. But, if instead their website was closed for a planned relaunch, then the headline should read "LA Lakers' Website Closes!" or "LALakers.com Closes!"
philp 14y ago
Does anybody know how this "rogue" webmaster took undue advantage of the CyanogenMod brand? The Facebook post states something about referral deals with community sites. Any idea what that would mean in practical terms? Just curious.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  Maybe something like "pay me $300 and I'll put a link to your site/product on cyanogenmod.com"?
- facorreia 14y ago
  According to the conversation linked to by CM member koush[1], in one instance he approached a CM distributor requesting a 'contribution': "Hi, we noticed that you are selling these cards with CyanogenMod builds. We do not however seem to have any agreements in place for this and feel it's only fair that you start contributing to the CyanogenMod project to continue selling your products." [1] https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544 https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544
  - philp 14y ago
    Interesting. Thank you.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    That does seem fair, doesn't it?
    - facorreia 14y ago
      The team claim he was not authorized to make such claims and that the project never received these payments.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
blhack 14y ago
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 :)
- lambda 14y ago
  The new title is the same as the post title on Cyanogenmod.org. The change doesn't really lose information; almost everything in the original title was false. Perhaps a better title would be "cyanogenmod.com hijacked by rogue admin, transitions to cyanogenmod.org". But the usual policy here when changing titles is to change it to the original title of the article, which is what it is now.
  - lambda 14y ago
    Ah, the new title it much better; has all of the relevant information, and is correct. Great! Thanks to the admins!
- saket123 14y ago
  As OP I agree. The title was not sensationalist. I guess moderators changed the link and title. I agree with changing link but not with the present title. The .com domain was my bookmarked domain and usually I will go this domain first before going to any other CM link. As a donor to CM I felt shocked that even the .com Google apps account is now taken down by rogue admin. Usually these accounts were used by users and other developers. All the social media were also linking through this .com email addresses AFAIK.
- publicfig 14y ago
  Maybe there was a middle ground, but the former title made it seem like CyanogenMod itself was taken offline, and made no mention to the domain itself. I'd say in situations like that it's just better to default to the actual article title.
- cdr 14y ago
  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.
thechut 14y ago
Why is everyone complaining about the title? Yes its a bit sensationalist but all of this is detracting from the actual story here. While it's true that cyanogenmod.com going down may not serve a functional problem to most people but it is a pretty sad story. I have used Cyanogen on a couple phones and all my Android devices use the Clockwork recovery, which is an incredible tool. I don't know the specifics but I don't think anybody on the Cyanogen team was receiving money for their work. Granted, there are premium versions in the Play Store, but certainly nobody is getting rich of Cyanogen or clockwork. The fact that somebody is screwing them over just to make a couple bucks seems pretty terrible to me. These guys do this for fun and for the good of the community (not to mention for the good of Google), so my heart really goes out to them. I hope you get everything sorted out and get everything back up. There is a PayPal donation form at the bottom of their site. I have donated in the past when they have asked and I'm sure I will this time if they make an appeal to pay for legal fees. Again, so sad to see this happen to such a great group of devs.
- saket123 14y ago
  I like the idea of buying a related domain and donating it to the community as mentioned in another comment. I agree that we as community of hackers should try to figure out how can we help CM who are just a group a volunteers doing great work for the community.
gte910h 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- antidoh 14y ago
  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.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    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.
- dkokelley 14y ago
  The ownership is in question. This guy bought the domain in its early days and "donated" it to the project. Does he own it? What if he paid for its continued registration? Does CM own it under trademark? Given the nature of how CM got started, I doubt there was a formal agreement between the parties.
polyvisual 14y ago
Phew, my first instinct when reading the start of that post was that some rogue code had been committed. Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post.
- MrMember 14y ago
  >Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post. Indeed, I check the HN comments for interesting conversation, not drivel about whether or not the submitted article's title is sensationalist.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
SafeSituation 14y ago
As of right now (4:34 EST) cyanogenmod.com redirects to cyanogenmod.org
- pserwylo 14y ago
  Yup, I have the same thing. Is this a(nother) change of heart from the owner? Or did ICANN intervene that quickly? I find it hard to believe its the later.
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    I'm guessing a change of heart from the owner once things went public. As you say, it's unlikely that there would be any intervention that quickly.
trhtrsh 14y ago
Seems similar to the MacPorts vs DarwinPorts domain name issue: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPortsFraud http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPortsFraud But in that case, no domain was transferred, it was just confusing from the start.
VMG 14y ago
Why are large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature? I always shiver a little if I have to dive into xda-forums, but this takes it to the next level. Puts all the actual hard working developers in a bad light.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Something about a sufficiently large group of people and general idiocy.
- gcb 14y ago
  Because most self-respecting developers do not like to work on a platform where everything is closed source in the hardware... that said, i'm glad a few of the not-so-self-respecting good ones does not see a problem with that.
- lambda 14y ago
  I think its because they grew out of the phone ROM community, which pre-Android, generally meant hacking up a binary blob and distributing them on forums. This was never quite legal, but lots of people did it anyhow. Like any community build around legal grey areas, like Xbox and PS3 modders, there's a lot more anonymity, less professionalism, and the like, than there is, say in the free software world, where people are legally, and in many cases professionally, writing software to run on their own machines. Even once Android came out, there are enough binary blobs, like the actual phone firmware, drivers, the Play Store, the Google Apps, and so on, that a lot of the mods are just redistributions of the binary packages with a few configuration changes and some custom software on top, rather than a rebuild from source of AOSP.
- raphman 14y ago
  Could you elaborate on why this issue shows that "large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature"? As far as I can see, the developers trusted someone they should not have trusted. That is not necessarily a sign of being "unprofessional and immature", is it?
- tallanvor 14y ago
  Any volunteer organization risks running into this at some point. --You generally don't have any sort of contract because you're not paying anyone. I used to help run a convention, and one year the person who had designed the program book decided he deserved compensation and demanded a similar amount of money to let us use the design. We were left with only a couple of days to come up with a new design.
eykanal 14y ago
I'm mixed on whether this is a good way to handle reporting something like this to the public. On the one hand, they didn't release the guy's name, which is completely and entirely appropriate, and I commend them for doing so. On the other hand, giving so many details—many of which are not relevant to the public, and probably were not intended for the public—gives this PSA somewhat of a "well, screw you too" vibe. I think a simpler "we've been betrayed by an insider with access to everything, here's how we're fixing it, and yes, we're pursuing legal methods for dealing with this" would have been better. Leave out the gory details about who's hurt and whatnot. This is business. Still, this is better than half of the other "we've been betrayed" posts I've seen.
- bsenftner 14y ago
  Tell us the name of this rogue. I don't want to ever do business with the person, but how to know?
  - facorreia 14y ago
    It's public via whois.
    - michaelhoffman 14y ago
      Registrant: MetServe Enterprises Limited Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB Domain name: CYANOGENMOD.COM Administrative Contact: Enterprises, MetServe info@metserve.com Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB +44.2081232629 Technical Contact: Enterprises, MetServe info@metserve.com Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB +44.2081232629 Doesn't have a person's name though.
      - facorreia 14y ago
        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.
eykanal 14y ago
I'm mixed on whether this is a good way to handle reporting something like this to the public. On the one hand, they didn't release the guy's name, which is completely and entirely appropriate, and I commend them for doing so. On the other hand, giving so many details—many of which are not relevant to the public, and probably were not intended for the public—gives this PSA somewhat of a "well, screw you too" vibe. I think a simpler "we've been betrayed by an insider with access to everything, here's how we're fixing it, and yes, we're pursuing legal methods for dealing with this" would have been better. Leave out the gory details about who's hurt and whatnot. This is business. Still, this is better than half of the other "we've been betrayed" posts I've seen.
mkup 14y ago
Domains are real estate of the internet. Losing domain control is like losing your house or land.
cookiecaper 14y ago
Cyanogenmod devs need to get PGP keys and start using cryptographic signatures like now. The guy never would have been able to impersonate in the first place if they were doing this, and now it's even more important that the @cyanogenmod.com domain is directing to a different mail server.
- lambda 14y ago
  Not sure if that's the case. Most people he was impersonating himself to probably don't know enough to find and check PGP signatures; especially since most email does not come with PGP signatures, the lack of a signature is not something that would cause anyone to bat an eyelash.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    If he prominently announced on his sites "DO NOT accept anything without a cryptographic signature as authentic", it is likely to have worked. It's not like the targeted victims had not visited Cyanogen's site or done any research before. And at worst, a policy of signing all emails makes it so he can't be framed; someone can't alter mails and claim they were sent in that state, and if this guy thought he was going to be caught and went into the mail server to try and plant the evidence so that when the deals fell through the real Cyanogen was still on the hook, he wouldn't be able to reproduce a valid signature and one would say "Cyanogen was obviously framed, as he would never certify a deal in an email without a cryptographic signature".
    - jrockway 14y ago
      How would have they distributed the keys? I can easily upload a key with an arbitrary id and username to any public keyserver. You have to actually check that you trust the key by utilizing the web of trust. Alternatively, you could use SSL certificates, but since the attacker controlled cyanogenmod.com, he probably could have social-engineered the CA to issue him an email certificate. Trust is hard.
cookiecaper 14y ago
This is pretty scary now that CM has started to do OTA updates again. What server is that mechanism checking and trusting? Is there any cryptographic verification for update packages? Whose keys are used (the keys of the bad dude?)?
- BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
  This is definitely important to find out in the wake of this incident, and I'm anxious to learn the answers myself. That said, CyanogenMod distributes its builds through a separate dedicated site [1] that appears to be unaffected. [1] http://get.cm/ http://get.cm/
rapsac 14y ago
I think this would be a good time for Anonymous to step in and wipe this guy off the map.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pla3rhat3r 14y ago
I had this happen to me when I started a music blog in 2008. Some trust fund brat decided he would hijack the site and I was forced to basically start over. It was painful but 3 years later I'm glad I did. I was able to rebuild and now have a better site with a better team in place. It'll take time but these guys will recover too. Integrity always wins!
lambda 14y ago
Wow, this thread is pretty interesting, in which you can see the owner of the .com domain convincing someone to donate $500 a month to what they thought was the cyanogenmod team: https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/code/2852d314c34d502cd2ae76493253c4e58961948/?p=1 https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/cod... And in the thread, he mentions that Swappa is doing the same thing, $500 a month plus $10 per device sold, though there's no way to verify if that's true. Swappa claims to donate $5 per device sold to Cyanogenmod, though who knows if that's been going to the actual project or this joker. http://swappa.com/cyanogenmod http://swappa.com/cyanogenmod That's some pretty serious fraud there, if this is true.
- vitobcn 14y ago
  It seems that previous owner of the .com domain has handed it back to Cyanogenmod already (probably due to the unwanted publicity): http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-re... They will stay with the .org domain though, and have the previous .com domain redirect to it.
moens 14y ago
Ideas will be stolen. I know this is a hotly debated topic, and I agree with the raw idea != actionable idea, yadda^3. I cannot emphasize enough to developers and to startups: all war is about money, all business is about money. When you get to the point that you are making money, you are in business... and all business is war (imo). If you go in thinking like that (not freaked paranoia, but strategic defensive development), you will avoid a lot of this trauma. I feel for you guys, I've been there.
nacs 14y ago
Seems the guy who stole the domain is trying to undo his damage and possibly hand the domain back (likely due to the negative attention this is bringing him). He posted this to his Twitter account a few minutes ago: "we've already had this conversation. The DNS was changed in preparation to hand the domain back to Steve. You all jumped the gun." https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268837555129167873 https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268837555129167873 "DNS propagation can take 72 hours. The domain was transferred about an hour ago. It was transferred to another UK registrar." - https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268881716876300288 https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268881716876300288 UPDATE: Seems he really has handed the domain back now?: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-re...

381 points by saket123 14y ago

streptomycin 14y ago

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

chimeracoder 14y ago
Just checked on DuckDuckGo - #1 as well.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
grandpoobah 14y ago
How did it happen so quickly?
- pja 14y ago
  A lot of links from high profile sites presumably.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    And .com completely gone? In an hour? I would say there was a human intervention. Although Bing points to .org as well...
    - moheeb 14y ago
      Are you implying nobody human would work for Bing?
      - JL2010 14y ago
        The implication is about the type of humans at Bing, y'know, the Microsoft type?
      - rplnt 14y ago
        No, just that the chance of human involvement for two major search engines within an hour seems lower.
    - lambda 14y ago
      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.
- stanleydrew 14y ago
  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.
  - Achshar 14y ago
    It looks more likely that someone form the search team browses HN or uses Cyanogen (very likely) and they intervened and updated the index manually. I am sure google has a back-end to do stuff manually.
timothya 14y ago
It's the #1 on Bing and DuckDuckGo as well, though interestingly you can still see links in the .com in both Bing and DuckDuckGo results, but Google has eliminated the .com completely from their results.

bronson 14y ago

It seems a nice idea, buying the CM.com domain and donating it to the project. Wonder if this sleazeball had a change of heart, or was he planning on embezzling referral traffic the whole time?

greyboy 14y ago
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 what led up to this scenario.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kamjam 14y ago
  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.
  - greyboy 14y ago
    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).
    - kamjam 14y ago
      Glad to read the story that all has been resolved now! :)
- 14y ago

lambda 14y ago

Title is sensationalist. Should be something like "Transition to Cyanogenmod.org"; Cyanogenmod is not offline, just cyanogenmod.com Google already give you cyanogenmod.org when you search for cyanogenmod. Was this always their preferred domain, or is Google just that quick to update? Post on cyanogenmod.org for those who prefer not to use Facebook: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmod-org http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/psa-transition-to-cyanogenmo... For the sake of posterity, the original title was "Cyanogenmod taken offline by developer", and the link was to the same story, but posted on Facebook.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- lambda 14y ago
  Sensationalist because it is false, and misleads you in a way that makes you believe this is a bigger deal than it actually is. Nothing is offline. All that has changed is the domain. "Cyanogenmod" is not offline. "cyanogenmod.com" is offline, but everything that was there is at "cyanogenmod.org" so even saying "cyanogenmod.com is offline" would be misleading. Also, the "taken offline by developer" part is patently false. The website was taken offline by someone who donated the domain name, and is now using it to try and make affiliate deals and extort the developer. Really, there is an actually interesting story here. The title could be "cyanogenmod.com hijacked by rogue admin"; that is just as interesting, and actually true. Almost nothing about "Cyanogenmod taken offline by developer" is true.
  - marshray 14y ago
    Looks to me like a lot of search results return cyanogenmod.com, which suggests that many bookmarks are now broken.
    - lambda 14y ago
      I'm not saying that this isn't a big deal. I'm saying that the headline is false. It implies that Cyanogenmod itself has been taken down by its developer. That is not true at all. The domain name has been taken down by the person who donated in the first place, and is now trying to make a quick buck off of it. Sure, bookmarks may break. Yes, it's an important story. But Cyanogenmod has not been taken offline by its developer.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Jeraimee 14y ago

Can we get a title change here. This title is not only wrong but just worded to grab attention.

shardling 14y ago
How is it wrong? Their original website was taken offline by a (now former) developer, forcing them to change domains. Seems like the title is perfectly accurate.
- zetx 14y ago
  It's confusing at the very least. "CyanogenMod [domain] taken offline by developer" vs "CyanogenMod [project] taken offline by developer"
  - bmasci 14y ago
    This. My first thought was that CM was no longer available. I did not think anything of the domain.
  - janus 14y ago
    Obligatory reference http://xkcd.com/932/ http://xkcd.com/932/
  - lambda 14y ago
    And it wan't by a developer. It was by a rogue admin. "By developer" implies that it was done by one of the core Cyanogenmod developers, perhaps even Cyanogen himself.
- jeffool 14y ago
  Because the title doesn't say "the website" was taken offline. It suggests CyanogenMod itself is no longer available from the developer. Imagine the headline "LA Lakers Closes!" That tells me the basketball team is no more. But, if instead their website was closed for a planned relaunch, then the headline should read "LA Lakers' Website Closes!" or "LALakers.com Closes!"

philp 14y ago

Does anybody know how this "rogue" webmaster took undue advantage of the CyanogenMod brand? The Facebook post states something about referral deals with community sites. Any idea what that would mean in practical terms? Just curious.

tadfisher 14y ago
Maybe something like "pay me $300 and I'll put a link to your site/product on cyanogenmod.com"?
facorreia 14y ago
According to the conversation linked to by CM member koush[1], in one instance he approached a CM distributor requesting a 'contribution': "Hi, we noticed that you are selling these cards with CyanogenMod builds. We do not however seem to have any agreements in place for this and feel it's only fair that you start contributing to the CyanogenMod project to continue selling your products." [1] https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544 https://twitter.com/koush/status/268836995890028544
- philp 14y ago
  Interesting. Thank you.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  That does seem fair, doesn't it?
  - facorreia 14y ago
    The team claim he was not authorized to make such claims and that the project never received these payments.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

blhack 14y ago

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 :)

lambda 14y ago
The new title is the same as the post title on Cyanogenmod.org. The change doesn't really lose information; almost everything in the original title was false. Perhaps a better title would be "cyanogenmod.com hijacked by rogue admin, transitions to cyanogenmod.org". But the usual policy here when changing titles is to change it to the original title of the article, which is what it is now.
- lambda 14y ago
  Ah, the new title it much better; has all of the relevant information, and is correct. Great! Thanks to the admins!
saket123 14y ago
As OP I agree. The title was not sensationalist. I guess moderators changed the link and title. I agree with changing link but not with the present title. The .com domain was my bookmarked domain and usually I will go this domain first before going to any other CM link. As a donor to CM I felt shocked that even the .com Google apps account is now taken down by rogue admin. Usually these accounts were used by users and other developers. All the social media were also linking through this .com email addresses AFAIK.
publicfig 14y ago
Maybe there was a middle ground, but the former title made it seem like CyanogenMod itself was taken offline, and made no mention to the domain itself. I'd say in situations like that it's just better to default to the actual article title.
cdr 14y ago
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.

thechut 14y ago

Why is everyone complaining about the title? Yes its a bit sensationalist but all of this is detracting from the actual story here. While it's true that cyanogenmod.com going down may not serve a functional problem to most people but it is a pretty sad story. I have used Cyanogen on a couple phones and all my Android devices use the Clockwork recovery, which is an incredible tool. I don't know the specifics but I don't think anybody on the Cyanogen team was receiving money for their work. Granted, there are premium versions in the Play Store, but certainly nobody is getting rich of Cyanogen or clockwork. The fact that somebody is screwing them over just to make a couple bucks seems pretty terrible to me. These guys do this for fun and for the good of the community (not to mention for the good of Google), so my heart really goes out to them. I hope you get everything sorted out and get everything back up. There is a PayPal donation form at the bottom of their site. I have donated in the past when they have asked and I'm sure I will this time if they make an appeal to pay for legal fees. Again, so sad to see this happen to such a great group of devs.

saket123 14y ago
I like the idea of buying a related domain and donating it to the community as mentioned in another comment. I agree that we as community of hackers should try to figure out how can we help CM who are just a group a volunteers doing great work for the community.

gte910h 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
antidoh 14y ago
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.
- gte910h 14y ago
  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.
dkokelley 14y ago
The ownership is in question. This guy bought the domain in its early days and "donated" it to the project. Does he own it? What if he paid for its continued registration? Does CM own it under trademark? Given the nature of how CM got started, I doubt there was a formal agreement between the parties.

polyvisual 14y ago

Phew, my first instinct when reading the start of that post was that some rogue code had been committed. Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post.

MrMember 14y ago
>Note: it's a shame most of the comments here are about the title of this post. Indeed, I check the HN comments for interesting conversation, not drivel about whether or not the submitted article's title is sensationalist.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

SafeSituation 14y ago

As of right now (4:34 EST) cyanogenmod.com redirects to cyanogenmod.org

pserwylo 14y ago
Yup, I have the same thing. Is this a(nother) change of heart from the owner? Or did ICANN intervene that quickly? I find it hard to believe its the later.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  I'm guessing a change of heart from the owner once things went public. As you say, it's unlikely that there would be any intervention that quickly.

trhtrsh 14y ago

Seems similar to the MacPorts vs DarwinPorts domain name issue: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPortsFraud http://trac.macports.org/wiki/DarwinPortsFraud But in that case, no domain was transferred, it was just confusing from the start.

VMG 14y ago

Why are large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature? I always shiver a little if I have to dive into xda-forums, but this takes it to the next level. Puts all the actual hard working developers in a bad light.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
Something about a sufficiently large group of people and general idiocy.
gcb 14y ago
Because most self-respecting developers do not like to work on a platform where everything is closed source in the hardware... that said, i'm glad a few of the not-so-self-respecting good ones does not see a problem with that.
lambda 14y ago
I think its because they grew out of the phone ROM community, which pre-Android, generally meant hacking up a binary blob and distributing them on forums. This was never quite legal, but lots of people did it anyhow. Like any community build around legal grey areas, like Xbox and PS3 modders, there's a lot more anonymity, less professionalism, and the like, than there is, say in the free software world, where people are legally, and in many cases professionally, writing software to run on their own machines. Even once Android came out, there are enough binary blobs, like the actual phone firmware, drivers, the Play Store, the Google Apps, and so on, that a lot of the mods are just redistributions of the binary packages with a few configuration changes and some custom software on top, rather than a rebuild from source of AOSP.
raphman 14y ago
Could you elaborate on why this issue shows that "large parts of the android custom ROM community unprofessional and immature"? As far as I can see, the developers trusted someone they should not have trusted. That is not necessarily a sign of being "unprofessional and immature", is it?
tallanvor 14y ago
Any volunteer organization risks running into this at some point. --You generally don't have any sort of contract because you're not paying anyone. I used to help run a convention, and one year the person who had designed the program book decided he deserved compensation and demanded a similar amount of money to let us use the design. We were left with only a couple of days to come up with a new design.

eykanal 14y ago

I'm mixed on whether this is a good way to handle reporting something like this to the public. On the one hand, they didn't release the guy's name, which is completely and entirely appropriate, and I commend them for doing so. On the other hand, giving so many details—many of which are not relevant to the public, and probably were not intended for the public—gives this PSA somewhat of a "well, screw you too" vibe. I think a simpler "we've been betrayed by an insider with access to everything, here's how we're fixing it, and yes, we're pursuing legal methods for dealing with this" would have been better. Leave out the gory details about who's hurt and whatnot. This is business. Still, this is better than half of the other "we've been betrayed" posts I've seen.

bsenftner 14y ago
Tell us the name of this rogue. I don't want to ever do business with the person, but how to know?
- facorreia 14y ago
  It's public via whois.
  - michaelhoffman 14y ago
    Registrant: MetServe Enterprises Limited Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB Domain name: CYANOGENMOD.COM Administrative Contact: Enterprises, MetServe info@metserve.com Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB +44.2081232629 Technical Contact: Enterprises, MetServe info@metserve.com Kemp House City Road London, London EC1V 2NX GB +44.2081232629 Doesn't have a person's name though.
    - facorreia 14y ago
      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.

eykanal 14y ago

mkup 14y ago

Domains are real estate of the internet. Losing domain control is like losing your house or land.

cookiecaper 14y ago

Cyanogenmod devs need to get PGP keys and start using cryptographic signatures like now. The guy never would have been able to impersonate in the first place if they were doing this, and now it's even more important that the @cyanogenmod.com domain is directing to a different mail server.

lambda 14y ago
Not sure if that's the case. Most people he was impersonating himself to probably don't know enough to find and check PGP signatures; especially since most email does not come with PGP signatures, the lack of a signature is not something that would cause anyone to bat an eyelash.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  If he prominently announced on his sites "DO NOT accept anything without a cryptographic signature as authentic", it is likely to have worked. It's not like the targeted victims had not visited Cyanogen's site or done any research before. And at worst, a policy of signing all emails makes it so he can't be framed; someone can't alter mails and claim they were sent in that state, and if this guy thought he was going to be caught and went into the mail server to try and plant the evidence so that when the deals fell through the real Cyanogen was still on the hook, he wouldn't be able to reproduce a valid signature and one would say "Cyanogen was obviously framed, as he would never certify a deal in an email without a cryptographic signature".
  - jrockway 14y ago
    How would have they distributed the keys? I can easily upload a key with an arbitrary id and username to any public keyserver. You have to actually check that you trust the key by utilizing the web of trust. Alternatively, you could use SSL certificates, but since the attacker controlled cyanogenmod.com, he probably could have social-engineered the CA to issue him an email certificate. Trust is hard.

cookiecaper 14y ago

This is pretty scary now that CM has started to do OTA updates again. What server is that mechanism checking and trusting? Is there any cryptographic verification for update packages? Whose keys are used (the keys of the bad dude?)?

BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
This is definitely important to find out in the wake of this incident, and I'm anxious to learn the answers myself. That said, CyanogenMod distributes its builds through a separate dedicated site [1] that appears to be unaffected. [1] http://get.cm/ http://get.cm/

rapsac 14y ago

I think this would be a good time for Anonymous to step in and wipe this guy off the map.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pla3rhat3r 14y ago

I had this happen to me when I started a music blog in 2008. Some trust fund brat decided he would hijack the site and I was forced to basically start over. It was painful but 3 years later I'm glad I did. I was able to rebuild and now have a better site with a better team in place. It'll take time but these guys will recover too. Integrity always wins!

lambda 14y ago

Wow, this thread is pretty interesting, in which you can see the owner of the .com domain convincing someone to donate $500 a month to what they thought was the cyanogenmod team: https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/code/2852d314c34d502cd2ae76493253c4e58961948/?p=1 https://store.n2acards.com/helpdesk/viewticket/moderator/cod... And in the thread, he mentions that Swappa is doing the same thing, $500 a month plus $10 per device sold, though there's no way to verify if that's true. Swappa claims to donate $5 per device sold to Cyanogenmod, though who knows if that's been going to the actual project or this joker. http://swappa.com/cyanogenmod http://swappa.com/cyanogenmod That's some pretty serious fraud there, if this is true.

vitobcn 14y ago
It seems that previous owner of the .com domain has handed it back to Cyanogenmod already (probably due to the unwanted publicity): http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-re... They will stay with the .org domain though, and have the previous .com domain redirect to it.

moens 14y ago

Ideas will be stolen. I know this is a hotly debated topic, and I agree with the raw idea != actionable idea, yadda^3. I cannot emphasize enough to developers and to startups: all war is about money, all business is about money. When you get to the point that you are making money, you are in business... and all business is war (imo). If you go in thinking like that (not freaked paranoia, but strategic defensive development), you will avoid a lot of this trauma. I feel for you guys, I've been there.

nacs 14y ago

Seems the guy who stole the domain is trying to undo his damage and possibly hand the domain back (likely due to the negative attention this is bringing him). He posted this to his Twitter account a few minutes ago: "we've already had this conversation. The DNS was changed in preparation to hand the domain back to Steve. You all jumped the gun." https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268837555129167873 https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268837555129167873 "DNS propagation can take 72 hours. The domain was transferred about an hour ago. It was transferred to another UK registrar." - https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268881716876300288 https://twitter.com/MrADeveci/status/268881716876300288 UPDATE: Seems he really has handed the domain back now?: http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-resolved http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/domain-situation-has-been-re...