CyanogenMod alleges hijacking of its domain

Was it a domain dispute backed by claims of impersonation and blackmail? Or just a misunderstanding that led to jumping quickly to conclusions?

Earlier today, the team behind CyanogenMod announced that it is moving to cyanogenmod.org after a dispute with the owner of the cyanogenmod.com domain name.

CyanogenMod is an open-source replacement for Android on mobile devices that was started by Steve "Cyanogen" Kondik, who is currently employed by Samsung.

"A little over a week ago, things took a bad turn. The person owning the cyanogenmod.com domain was caught impersonating Steve to make referral deals with community sites. When confronted and asked to hand over control of the domain amicably, he decided he wanted US$10,000 for it, which we won't (and can't) pay," wrote ciwrl, CyanogenMod's head moderator.

"We contacted those he had established deals with, only to discover that the person tasked with maintaining our web presence was setting up deals under the CM name, and impersonating Cyanogen himself. Plenty of satisfying evidence was provided by those sites/entities to make us certain that this wasn't a misunderstanding or one-time thing."

The blog post claims that the owner of the cyanogenmod.com domain name redirected the DNS entries of the website, including the MX records, which killed off the project's web presence as well as its Google Apps-based email. Subsequently, the website was moved over to cyanogenmod.org.

At the time of writing, though, cyanogenmod.com was redirecting to the new cyanogenmod.org website.

The reported owner of cyanogenmod.com is Ahmet Deveci, who is claiming via his Twitter account that no one was impersonated, and that the DNS changes are a result of preparing the domain to be transferred.

The CyanogenMod project tagged its CyanogenMod 10.0 release as "stable" this week. This release is based on the 4.1 release of Android Jelly Bean.