PeerGuardian hijacker threatens Shareaza

Thu,11 Jun 2009 15:00 GMT -4:00 http://www.p2pnet.net/story/23156

- In 2005, the PeerGuardian website methlabs.org was hijacked, reported.

“The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents,” we said. “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 web site’s assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff.”

The hijacker was allegedly Will Erwin, then a student in Texas, we understand.

This morning, “Erwin shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near any project for any  reason,” a PG source told .

But now he’s turned up again, this time threatening both the Sourceforge Shareaza project, and the new Website (with the auto-update mechanism), says an email from a reliable source.

“William Erwin, a donor with screen name Rhythm, was given access - against private objections - by financing our ongoing legal battle,” says the source, going on »»»

Activity by a new proxy account on sourceforge can be seen here: http://sourceforge.net/users/ruroufro/

This is a rapidly evolving situation, but clearly timed to disrupt opposition to the patent office publishing iMesh’s Shareaza trademark this month.

“Shareaza WILL NOT be abanded,” says our source, adding a “new project” contingency, quietly put together over the past year, “is polished and ready”.

Says the Wikipedia »»»

On 19 December 2007, the project’s domain name, shareaza.com, was without Shareaza developers permission redirected to an unrelated site, promoting the download of a client known as ShareazaV4 [6] (or respectively ShareazaV5 etc) which promotes commercial netshoping from Discordia LTD, israelian company related to music industry. As a result, the original open source project was forced to move its home page to Shareaza.SourceForge.net, part of SourceForge.net.

Since 1 January 2008, current shareaza.com domain user, Discordia LTD., uses advantage of the automatic update feature built into versions prior to 2.3.1 of the original Shareaza to suggest to users that ShareazaV4 is an update to open source Shareaza. This vulnerability was fixed in Shareaza 2.3.1.0 [7], released on January 3rd  [8]. It is the last stable version of Shareaza that will support Windows 9x. [9]

Yahoo, which uses SiteAdvisor to filter their search results [10], no longer lists domain shareaza.com due to it being listed by SiteAdvisor as a security risk. [11] Other website rating services, such as WOT (Web of Trust), also rate Shareaza.com as dangerous. [12]

Attempted trademark registration

On January 10, 2008, the new owners of Shareaza.com, Discordia Ltd (iMesh Inc.), filed for trademark registration of the Shareaza name in an attempt to stop the original developers from using the name, claiming that the first-ever use was on December 17, 2007. [13] The Shareaza Development Team have obtained legal representation to challenge the registration and a legal defense fund has been set up. [14]

This is a breaking story.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton -

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June, 2009


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