Battleangel

Since I haven’t been following the development I have no idea what initiated the rift but the conspiratorial side of me of course suspects that the industry is somehow involved.

TorrentSpy - 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 website’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 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.

And in the meantime, the official site reassures us that …

Methlabs - Recently, we had several former staff members revolt against the entire P2P community as a whole. They tried to sabatoge Methlabs and attempted to wipe the Methlabs server of all its data.

Unfortunately, they gained access to site backups. In doing so, your passwords may have been compromised, although they are MD5 encrypted. We would like to you login to the Methlabs forums (http://methlabs.org/forums/) and change your password. We sincerely apologize for this issue.

Since all the data was stolen by former staff members, YOU MAY RECIEVE FAKE EMAILS that look like they are from Methlabs. If they do not come from the Methlabs.org domain and from our email servers, DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

We assure you that Methlabs development will continue, and ALL OFFICIAL PROGRAMS MUST be downloaded directly from Methlabs.org . Assume that all other sites contain spyware or malicious code which may not be directly trusted.

Confusing, isn’t it? Of course, judging by the spelling and lack of any sort of names attached to the latter statement, my assumption is still that Methlab is dead. Maybe not compromised by the media industry, but certainly dead.