The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their web site 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 web site'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 web sites 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.
Development of PeerGuardian will resume, and the web site will temporarily move to http://peerguardian.sf.net/ until a new domain is registered and a new server found. The intention of the group is to register a non-profit organisation to handle the development of Methlabs applications and to promote open source projects that aid both security, privacy and peer-to-peer technologies, in order to prevent a repeat of this incident.
The team wish all their users the best through this difficult time, but promise that development will continue. Please visit http://peerguardian.sf.net/ for news as we make progress. All other sites, including http://methlabs.org and http://blocklist.org, are under control of the rogue member and should not be trusted for safe updates to our applications or lists.
A new build of PeerGuardian will be released soon to reflect these changes. Until then we ask you to continue using Beta 6a but with caution as the list update servers are no longer under our control and may be unsafe. Please read our guide to securing Beta 6a to ensure you are safe.
It is worth mentioning that PeerGuardian 2.0 Beta 6b has been released. Update is recommended by the Methlabs team to ensure your privacy and safety.
PeerGuardian for Windows 2000/XP/2003 v2.0 Beta 6b: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/p2p_software/p2p_tools/peerguardian.cfm
PeerGuardian for Windows 98/ME v2.0 Beta 6b: https://www.afterdawn.com/software/p2p_software/p2p_tools/peerguardian_9x.cfm
Thanks to FuRiOuS1 for sending me the email notifying me several days ago. My apologies again for the delay getting it online.
Also, thanks to venomX05, zdhonda and Alien13 who sent News Submissions also.
Source:
New Methlabs Site
Written by: James Delahunty @ 19 Sep 2005 20:17