One of those two sites is distributing adware. Which of them?
File Converter (FOSS) by Adrien Allard was hosted on file-converter[.]org since a decade. Then someone a few weeks ago snatched that domain and it’s now distributing adware. Almost identical design for the page, 100% designed to deceive users to download a different product, as it’s called Zamzar.
In the github issues the dev is aware of this but he’s not completely enraged, just mildly infuriated that the design is too similar and he’s politely asking to have a different design.
From the history in the wayback machine i don’t see any “parking” page between the switch, so my guesswork is that the dev has been approached with an offer like “we like that domain, we would like to buy it for $$$”, unaware that they would copy the design like that in order to achieve maximum deception of users
Report it to safe search so chrome starts blocking the page.
No u
The benefit of using a package manager like Winget, brew, apt, snap, fdroid is that these attacks are less likely especially with doubly signed reproducible builds like fdroid
If you contact the .org registry they’ll take it down. .org is for non-profits
Is that really an enforced rule somewhere, or just one of those loose intentions from the early days of domain names?
If it is, it’s news to me. I co-owned an education data consultancy (before realizing there was no money in education) that used a .org; we were for-profit.
Sounds like you unintentionally fit the brief anyway.
The people who maintain .org enforce it
TIL
Unfortunately this isn’t uncommon. This us part of the reason I stopped using Google
Not to mention all the malware under the sponsored section
Like Windows
The domain for my country is .ar and most sites that use said domain use .com.ar
Someone registered com under the .com.ar domain so if you add .com.ar to any url that ends in .com you get redirected to their adware site
Mildly infuriating? Sounds more like genuinely criminal
It seems it’s not so much they stole the domain, it’s that they are using the same name with a different top-level domain. This is a common shady practice in malware. Most people can’t afford to purchase every TLD or their domain and so just pick one or two. Problem is that search engines will find the bad TLDs and suggest them over the real TLD if the malware providers do proper SEO manipulation. A FOSS author is unlikely to be able to or afford the time and effort it takes to manipulate search results and most popular search engines are not doing much to fix the problem, and instead relying on “AI” to reduce the costs of maintaining their search results, which does a pretty bad job, IMHO.
originally it was hosted in the .org domain, then somehow it changed hands and it was changed to .io
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I didn’t see that mentioned anywhere and the git repo is showing .io
