Indie recreation market itch.io was seemingly torpedoed over the weekend by collectible maker Funko.
According to an X put up from the official itch.io account, the platform was taken down by Funko (maker of the immensely in style Funko Pop! collectible figurines) and its AI-powered model safety software program, Brand Shield.
“[Brand Shield] created some bogus phishing report back to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and simply disabled the area,” mentioned itch on social media, however not earlier than taking a second to model the software program as “trash.”
“Also, for transparency, we did take the disputed web page down as quickly as we received the discover as a result of it isn’t value combating stuff like that. Regardless, our registrar’s automated system possible kicked to disable the area since nobody learn our affirmation of removing.”
Itch.io co-founder Leaf Corcoran supplied extra context in a put up on Hacker News and mentioned the phishing reported filed by Funko and Brand Shield associated to a fan web page for a online game referred to as Funko Fusion, which is predicated on the Funko Pop! toy line.
“From what I can inform, some particular person made a fan web page for an current Funko Pop online game (Funko Fusion), with hyperlinks to the official website and screenshots of the sport,” wrote Corcoran.
“The BrandShield software program might be instructed to eradicate all ‘unauthorized’ use of their trademark, so that they despatched experiences independently to our host and registrar claiming there was “fraud and phishing” occurring, prone to trigger escalation as a substitute of doing the anticipated DMCA/cease-and-desist Because of this, I actually suppose they’re the malicious actor in all of this.”
Despite eradicating the fan web page and disabling the related account after being contacted by itch.io host Linode and registrar iwantmyname, Corcoran mentioned the latter by no means indicated the case had been closed. He then acquired a downtime alert.
“I seen that the area standing had been set to ‘serverHold’ on iwantmyname’s area panel. We don’t have any different abuse experiences from iwantmyname aside from this one. I’m assuming nobody on their finish ‘closed’ the ticket, so it went into an computerized system to disable the area after some variety of days,” Cocoran added.
“I’ve been making an attempt to get in contact with them through their abuse and assist emails, however no response possible because of the time of day, so I made a decision to “escalate” the problem myself on social media.”
Itch.io seems to be again on-line on the time of writing, though it did provide a workaround for these impacted by the scenario. “If you understand how to tweak your hosts file use: 45.33.107.166,” the corporate added in a follow-up put up.
“If you do edit your hosts file, please bear in mind to take away all of the strains after area is restored. Although we sometimes maintain an IP for some time, it will possibly change if we replace our back-end infrastructure. If the downtime exceeds 8 hours then we’ll possible prioritize deploying a brand new area. Hopefully issues are in a position to get sorted out earlier than then.”
Game Developer has reached out to Brand Shield, Funko, and Itch.io for extra data.
