Wednesday, March 09, 2011

The Copyists

Here's the story on the copied blog, courtesy of Tateru Nino:
There seems to be a whole industry that involves scraping posts off of other sites, maybe using an automated tool to change a few things like the byline and a few words here and there (so that it doesn't look like an exact copy to search engines), and then using that to link to other sites, or to farm ad revenue, or indeed to do drive-by malware installs.

Site investigator John Q. Anonymous (because he did it at work, so I'm not sure he wants his name out there) found this:
Bad. Badbadbad.

There may have been a click done from behind the safety of our firewall.

That may have resulted in at least 9 windows popping open.

So there you go. However, since it's not really safe to go there, let me share a screenshot, because the layout really is quite spiffy. Again, DO NOT GO THERE (do I need to repeat that?). Here you go:


Now I know what you're thinking: hey, why don't you rip off their design of your blog? Believe me, that's tempting at some level, but hell, I'm lazy. So it's much easier for me to just come up with a slogan for Dubious Quality: Homely, by design.

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