Posts Tagged ‘content theft’
by Jonathan Bailey on April 24th, 2013
Earlier this month, WordPress users across the world (as well as users on other platforms) fell victim to a massive brute-force attack on their sites.
The hack, or attempted hack, used a large botnet (a network of compromised computers doing the bidding of someone else) to repeatedly try and guess passwords on WordPress sites to gain administrative access to them. From there, the botnets would take over the sites and attempt to integrate them into a new bothnet, one made up of high-powered servers with better connections to the Web.
For most sites, the hacking attempt was pretty harmless. If you don’t use the original “admin” account and have a password that is easily guessed, you were most likely safe from the attack. Rather, the attack was an attempt to cast a broad net in hopes of finding the low-hanging fruit, sites that can be trivially broken into.
But while your site is probably fine as long as you took even the most basic precautions, there were still repercussions. The weight of thousands of attempts to login put a strain on many people’s servers, especially if the server had many different WordPress sites. This resulted in websites slowing to a crawl and even shutting down, including ones not directly affected.
But while the worst seems to have passed for now, there are still some lessons to be learned from it and it’s important to grasp them before the next wave hits.
Because if there’s one thing that’s for certain, there is another wave coming. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, WordPress Tips
Tags: content theft, copyright, copyright infringement, copyright law, DDoS, hack, hacking, password, Plagiarism, Security, wordpress
by Jonathan Bailey on April 10th, 2013
Earlier this week, Ars Technica ran an article about CMA Communications, a rural ISP that, for a time at least, began to display banner ads on all websites a customer visited. This move angered customers, who already paid for their Internet access, but it also was earning the attention of webmasters who were having ads injected into their sites, often covering up existing ad spots.
Though CMA Communications appears to have abandoned the project, it brought site manipulation to the limelight in a major way. It was the first time an ISP, supposedly an impartial intermediary, was interfering with customers’ Internet traffic for the purpose of injecting ads.
But just because CMA has stopped doesn’t mean that your site gets to your visitors exactly the way you intend. Unwanted site manipulation has been a problem for webmasters for some time and it may get a lot worse.
Though most bloggers know to check their theme on multiple browsers and devices, all of that tweaking and fine-tuning may be for naught if intermediaries, either with or without user permission, alter your site and give them a different experience.
So what are your visitors actually seeing when they come to your site? The answer may be more complex than you may realize. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense
Tags: ad injection, cma communications, content theft, malware, sambreel, spam
by Jonathan Bailey on March 23rd, 2011
What terms someone can use your content? Can they post your articles on their blog? What if the blog is commercial? What if they don’t give attribution? Can they share it on Facebook? What about printing out copies to give to friends?
If you don’t have a clear, ready answer for these questions, your visitors won’t either and that, in turn, means they will make mistakes. Whether they are taking liberties with your content you don’t approve of or avoiding sharing content in ways you do want, they will make mistakes with your content and hurt its chances of being used properly.
As such, you need to quickly and easily convey to your readers what your rules are regarding your content if you ever hope for them to be followed.
Unfortunately, most bloggers don’t think about content licensing and the issue doesn’t come up until they find their work on a spam site or plagiarized on another blog. By that time, however, it’s often too late as the situation is likely already out of hand.
This makes now, before there is a problem, the time to think about content licensing as tomorrow may simply be too late.
Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Marketing
Tags: content theft, copyright, copyright infringement, copyright law, creative commons, Licensing, Plagiarism
by Franky Branckaute on December 2nd, 2010
Content scraping is a major issue nowadays and most sites are the victim of scraping. Even here at Splashpress Media many of our sites are duplicated across the web and sites such as The Blog Herald and BloggingPro are duplicated several times every day, often entries are scraped more than 20-30 times. Nevertheless we do not care ‘too much’ about this and have found an own, editorial, approach/policy to deal with the issue of content scraping.
Our own Jonathan Bailey, author of BloggingPro’s Blogging Pitfalls column, founder of Plagiarism Today and CEO of Copybyte, explains how we generally deal with plagiarism and content theft at Splashpress Media in a new entry on Jack of All Blogs.
The surprise for many is probably that in most cases we do not react at all, instead we have found a new way to turn MFA and content scraping sites into free advertising. Check Jonathan’s entry out over at JOAB.
Categories: Interesting, News
Tags: content theft, Jack of All Blogs, Plagiarism, scraper, Splashpress Media
by Jonathan Bailey on November 24th, 2010
When you hit “publish” on a new post, how many copies of that post exist on your site? How about on the Web?
The truth is that there is no way to know exactly how many copies of your post you create because every theme and every site are different in this area. However, depending on your setup, you can create more than a dozen copies of the work on your site and that can create a serious headache both for yourself and for the search engines.
Duplicate content may not be the extreme danger it once was but it is a lurking problem for bloggers and other webmasters alike. However, it isn’t a simple one to stop, especially considering that the issue isn’t limited to what is going on with your site but can be amplified by the actions of others sites, including those you don’t control.
It’s worth taking a moment, if you haven’t already, to understand duplicate content, how it works and, most importantly, how to avoid it. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: Blogging Pitfalls, content theft, copyright, dmca, duplicate content, google, Plagiarism, search engines, seo
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