[Peerguardian-announce] Methlabs.org and PeerGuardian developers in exile

[Cory N. <ph...@gm...>]

Methlabs.org and PeerGuardian developers in exile

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team
have been forced out of their website 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 websites 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 website will
temporarily move to http://peerguardian.sourceforge.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 update servers are no longer under our control.

All staff are available in irc.freenode.net, channel #methlabs if you
wish to chat.

Thanks,

The Methlabs Staff (looking for a new home),

Adam Hoier, Cory Nelson, Eric Mayuk, Fox Lowe, James Shanelec,
Joseph Farthing, Ken McKelland, Steffen Tuzar, Tim Leonard

aka

braindancer, D3F, fox, FuRiOuS1, JFM, KuKIE, method, phrosty, r00ted