... i'm reeally really sorry about this, but it suddenly dawned on me that, under UK law, a breach of the UK's data protection act has occurred, and that the people responsible for setting up the hijacked services have committed a criminal offense under UK law.
ordinarily, a free software mailing list would be transferred to alternative services through the process of soliciting the users to enter into an implicit contract over a legally-enforceable reasonable amount of time, as follows: "in 30 days we will move the mailing list. anyone who doesn't want their personal data moved to the new server please say so". unfortunately, in this case, i have to advise that no such announcement had been made. although i gave permission to one of the people who has hijacked the domain my permission to aid and assist in the administration of the server, i did NOT give them permission to do anything else. unfortunately, they then abused the trust placed in them in order to gain unauthorised access to the machine. in this way, the data (ssh keys and user's email addresses) was copied WITHOUT my express permission (constituting unauthorised computer access and misuse of a computer), but worse than that WITHOUT the permission of the users who "own" their data (ssh keys and email addresses). as it's 2am here in the UK and also i will be travelling for the next couple of days, and also to preserve the state of the machine as evidence, i have had to shut down the XEN instance and will not be in a convenient position to access the email addresses in order to directly notify the users of the UK Data Protection Act breach. so for now, this announcement (to the python list, of all places) will have to do. for which i apologise, again, for having to inconvenience others who may not be interested in what has transpired. but to all concerned i apologise again, deeply, for putting everyone to trouble just because i decided to stick to free software principles. strange as that sounds. i honestly didn't see this coming. l. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
