The opendarwin .com debacle

[Scott Haneda]

On Oct 14, 2009, at 1:16 PM, Jeremy Lavergne wrote:

>> Two times now I've had someone tell me Fink was a better experience  
>> than Mac Ports to learn they had been to the .com site.
>>
>> If two users were misinformed by the .com site, how many more are,  
>> have been, or will be?
>
> I've come across some users in IRC that were equally confused.  He  
> needs to know he is not helping.
>
> I recall in the past when reading his emails with the portmgrs that  
> he thought it was helpful to visitors.  We need to document that  
> it's clearly not and inform him as such.  Legal action can already  
> be taken since macports.org is copywriter with all rights reserved.   
> He is likely stealing content from us.

What is the last communication that was had with Matt, and what is his  
position?  Is there any point in opening dialogue with him again?

>> It appears the owner has turned to the dark side. Without getting  
>> into too much of a cat and mouse game, what about some very basic  
>> counter measures?
>
> Indeed, there is another domain suffix "protected" so you cannot  
> tell who registered it.  At least I didn't know about this  
> additional one until today.

What is it, it is not .net as far as I can tell, which seems to be  
available.  I would like to purchase this domain now, and donate it to  
macports, I can do the redirection or they can have the entire domain.  
How do I proceed?

This is a concern, that site is beating the official source in ranking
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=darwinports&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

>> He must be syncing the port tree from some machine on a schedule,  
>> why not block that machine?
>
> We can likely match the IP address up with the one that site is on.   
> I can't imagine that he uses more than one machine to do this.

Is there any interest from the MP team to add a referrer check in  
Apache to display a page that explains some of this?  I would be happy  
to create the page in the wiki.  I know there is a page now, but it is  
too verbose, it needs to be a simple sentence or two that explains  
this situation and gets them to the correct site.

>> Isn't the site is violation of some aspect of some license of some  
>> form? If that is the case, make him release his source, or stop, or  
>> whatever we can find to make this go away.
>
> It is a violation:  all rights for access to content on macports.org  
> are RESERVED.  We can technically already slap him with a takedown  
> notice.

Can you find the ISP?  I do not think there would be a lot of luck  
hitting up register.com, as domain take downs are a nasty road to go  
down.

> I'd like to front some money to portmgr (or backorder them myself)  
> to prevent this guy from containing to masquerade.

I am happy to do the same with the .net today, and can accept the  
transfer to whatever registrar they are using.

Unless someone tells me it is a bad idea, I would like to send Matt a  
friendly email, telling him he is doing more harm than good, and ask  
him to shut the site down, or redirect it to an appropriate spot.   
Ideally he would give up the domain name.
-- 
Scott * If you contact me off list replace talklists@ with scott@ *