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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>What happened to dillo.org?</title>
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<div class="main">
<h1>What happened to dillo.org?</h1>
<i>Written on 2024-03-31.</i>
<p>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>The domain <code>dillo.org</code> expired in 2022 and shortly after someone
bought it and placed a Wordpress blog with spam posts and some content copied
from the original Dillo website.
Please, <em>don't link to <code>dillo.org</code></em>, use instead the new
website
<a href="https://dillo-browser.github.io/">https://dillo-browser.github.io/</a>.
There is also a copy of the original
<a href="https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/">old website</a> in case you need to
link to an old page.
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>
First, keep in mind that the domain <code>dillo.org</code> was used to serve
several things:
<ul>
<li>The Dillo website since
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20030726012045/http://www.dillo.org/">at
least 2003</a>.
<li>The mail server (which included Jorge email, [email protected]).
<li>The developer mailing list at lists.dillo.org.
<li>The Mercurial repository at hg.dillo.org.
</ul>
<p>
So, a failure in the DNS would cause all those services to become
<em>unreachable</em>, specially the mail server. Developers were using
<code>@dillo.org</code> email addresses to communicate among themselves and to
the mailing list.
<p>
To understand the development situation of Dillo in 2022, we can take a
closer look at the commit frequency. It can be computed from the Git
repository<sup>[<a href="#fn1">1</a>]</sup>,
but keep in mind that it only covers the timeline <em>after</em> October of
2007, when it was switched from CVS to Mercurial (and later to Git, keeping the
history)<sup>[<a href="#fn2">2</a>]</sup>:
<img alt="Commits stalled in 2017" src="img/commits.png">
</p>
<p>The development of Dillo decayed from 2014 to 2017. The last 3.0.5 version
was released on 2015 and the next 3.1 release never happened.
The main architect of the rendering engine, Sebastian Geerken,
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/Kpuh3d6nNL8/">passed away</a> on
September 2016.
<p>The last email I found from Jorge (the main developer of
Dillo) was from
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/dillo/c/UQ1nWyMa3yo/m/07qhu9KqAgAJ">2019</a>,
recommending to use the development version on the Mercurial repository, instead
of waiting for the 3.1 release:
<blockquote>
<pre>
...
> According to the info on
> https://hg.dillo.org/dillo/raw-file/default/ChangeLog, dillo-3.1 [not
> released yet].
> I will probably wait until they release it officially.
IMHO, you should get it. It's being stable for years.
--
Cheers
Jorge.-
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
From the commit history and the mailing list messages one can reach the
conclusion that Dillo was not really being maintained around 2022. So it
is not a surprise that nobody was giving much attention to the domain renewal.
<h2>Expiration</h2>
<p>
From the Web Archive you can see that the domain name <code>dillo.org</code>
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20220602023156/https://www.dillo.org/">
was parked around Jun of 2022</a> and shortly after it displayed this
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20220810101323/http://dillo.org/contact.txt">message</a>:
<blockquote>
<pre>
Domain For Sale
For more high authority domain names for sale, please contact [email protected]
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
The moment the domain expired it took down the website, but also the mail
server used to reach the developers, as well as the mailing list. This
difficulted any attempt to reach them to warn about the domain expiration.
<p>
A notice was published on Hacker News when the
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32448104">domain was for sale</a>
on August, and a month later when the
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32991598">domain was "back"</a>.
Interestingly, the user <code>gurjeet</code> offered to buy the domain
back to the developers (thanks!), but they rejected:
<blockquote>
<pre>
I have decided not to sell the domain, and keep it. I have reuploaded the
original site from WayBackMachine, ...
</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>
However, they didn't upload the original site. They created a Wordpress blog
(Dillo cannot render it very well) and copied some content from the original
dillo.org, along with some blog posts that read like advertisements. You can
track their activity by looking at the
<a href="https://dillo.org/post-sitemap.xml">site map</a>.
<p>
Based on the content of the CriticalHit webpage, I assume they are placing
blog posts on dillo.org with a link to someone's page who has paid to get more
clicks, exploiting the situation where dillo.org it is still linked by many
places. I don't know if there are any laws that could protect us against this
type of
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching">abuse</a>.
The company seems to be based on
<a href="https://www.criticalhit.net/terms-of-use/">South Africa law</a>.
<h2>Aftermath</h2>
<p>
In the meanwhile, we have setup a new website based on GitHub pages (so
hopefully it won't dissapear soon) at
<a href="https://dillo-browser.github.io/">https://dillo-browser.github.io/</a>
which also includes a copy of the original content of the
<a href="https://dillo-browser.github.io/old/">old website</a> as it was before
the domain expired.
<p>
The repository was transformed into Git and is kept in
GitHub<sup>[<a href="#fn3">3</a>]</sup>
at
<a
href="https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo">https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo</a>.
The mailing list archives were recovered from the original server and they are
available
<a href="https://lists.mailman3.com/postorius/lists/dillo-dev.mailman3.com/">in
the new mailing list</a>.
<p>
Until we have a better plan on taking back dillo.org, please don't link to that
website as it is not trustworthy. If you can help us, please send and email to the
mailing list
<a href="mailto:dillo-dev@[email protected]">[email protected]</a>.
<section>
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn1">
<p>Here is the command to generate the plot in case you want to investigate
on your own:</p>
<pre>
% git log --pretty='format:%cd' --date=format:'%Y' | sort | uniq -c \
| awk '$2>2000{print $2,$1}' \
| gnuplot -p -e "set grid; set term pngcairo size 1000,300;\
set output \"commits.png\"; \
set title 'Number of commits in the Dillo repository over time since 2007'; \
plot '-' title 'commits' with linespoints lw 2 lc rgb \"black\""
</pre>
</li>
<li id="fn2">
<p>Notice that this plot is very different from the
<a href="https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo/graphs/contributors">one in
GitHub</a>, as they only
count contributions from users of GitHub and none of the main developers had an
account there:
<img alt="Missing a lot of commits" src="img/commits-gh.png">
</p>
</li>
<li id="fn3">
<p>This decision is not permanent, but it seems to be a good starting point.
It makes GitHub another single point of failure, but on the other hand, it
allows us to run the CI builds for "free" on several platforms.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</section>
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