Nagle just dropped me an email saying that he was getting a 403 error when trying to leave a comment. I checked around and I was getting a 403 error when I tried to get to the admin panel to find out what was going on. It freaked me out. I thought something/someone had blacklisted me from my own blog.
Apparently, the anti-spam plugin “Bad Behavior” likes to randomly ban IP addresses. It took the combined power of the tech-support guy at my host, myself and a heavy bit of googling to figure that out. I’ve got to hand it to the guys at my hosting company though, he went above and beyond trying to figure it out for me.
So, the solution was to FTP in, delete that plugins folder, which removes it from WP, and fire up the WP admin panel to make sure everything was ok. I tested it by installing the plugin again. Sure enough, soon as I did the entire world was banned for “malicious activity”. Maybe it’s a problem with the latest WP install, who knows. I’m just glad we got it figure out.
Most of the time I dislike embedding video into webpages. This would be an exception. It just restored my faith in humanity and reinforced my belief that Red Sox Nation has the best fans in the world.
Something has come to my attention, brought sharply into focus yesterday by a couple of revelations regarding this web site and spam traffic. It seems that my website, your website, potentially any web site that is accessible through RSS and more specifically, Google RSS syndication and reader, is potential bait for the newest, and in my opinion, lowest form of internet thievery.
The topic of people stealing someone else’s content and using it as their own has been around for a while and quite the hot button topic as of late. All sorts of web pundits have weighed in on what it is, how annoying it is, and how we need better anti-spam features to combat it. Some even offer suggestions on what do to about it. The most common answer is to contact their host and they’re ad revenue source.
I say all this because over the past week or so, I’ve been victim to this exact crime, and not by a person, but by a web scraping script.
The sad thing is that I’ve tracked down the exact person responsible and their host refuses to do anything. It might actually take legal action to resolve this issue.
I’ve decided to lay it all out for you here, in hopes that someone else might be able to prevent this from happening to them.
At the start, I received a few trackback spams, nothing out of the ordinary. I simply deleted them out of my moderation que, just like any normal person would do. Then I got some more, and I started to realize they were all coming from the same link. Being the curious sort, I followed the link to a website where, so far, three of my posts are being used, in excerpt form, to generate ad revenue for someone else. Immediately angered, I traced their site to their host, LiquidWeb. I contacted Liquidweb yesterday about the stolen content and link spamming. I made it very clear that stealing content is against copyright laws and falls under the DMCA. The “abuse” department at Liquidweb told me that they saw nothing wrong with the posts and that it wasn’t their problem. I’ve since sent even more pointed emails back to them but have yet to hear anything.
Still wanting to get to the bottom of this, I starting poking around their website further. I was being ripped off by a sub-domain, so I went a level up. It’s there that I read the following:
“Go away! This WPMU installation is private. You can’t sign up, and there’s nothing to read here. This is my experimentation blog. A place where I can test things out without any outside interference. Okay. Bye now.”
And, on a second page…
“I have to laugh a little, as I never envisioned someone bothering to read my “Go Away” post. Lo and behold, Dan of Dan Q’s Blog did and was even kind enough to link to me. So, I figured that I could return the favor.
He mentions the weird names of authors in the posts. I get a lot of comments about that. To be honest, the script I’m using for the auto-posting was not written by me, so I’m not sure where it gets those names.”
This tells me two things. First, that I’m not alone is being ripped and second, that it’s a script written specifically for auto-posting. This link to Dan’s website, which I kept in the quote, says basically what I’m saying now. That they’ve had posts duplicated and spammed by trackbacks. The website in question on Dan’s website is in fact the exact same one I’m dealing with. I won’t give them the satisfaction of linking to it.
Digging deeper, there was an update to Dan’s post:
“Apparently the mastermind behind the whole scam (handle “SEO_Mike”) explains it here.”
Well, now that’s just the jackpot in terms of information. According to SEO_Mike, there’s quite a bit of money to be made by “RSS scraping and auto blogging” as he calls it.
They even decide to run a little contest and see who can make the most money. There are quite a few interesting tid bits you can gleam from that forum:
“I’m going to participate in this as well using a WordPress mU setup”
“The blogs I just set up are off the top of my head or ideas taken from various sources. SearchEngineWatch has a good list of sites to get ideas from.”
“I’m going to be using Adsense primarily for these blogs, and some targetted CPA ads (mostly from Copeac, of course). The site is setup on a LiquidWeb VPS account, so I should have plenty of room to grow.”
“The goal of the sites is to make money. Period. So don’t get too attached to one site / one idea. Diversify. This is about numbers and doing something.”
I’m so angry, I actually feel physically ill. I haven’t felt this mad since someone threatened a member of my family when I was a teenager. I’m going to keep hounding Liquidweb, as they are directly responsible for this website being operational. I’m also going to pound on Adsense and Copeac and get their ad revenues pulled.
I can’t actually express in words my anger at the moment. This bullshit has got to stop. It’s time for the internet citizens to get their pitchforks and torches.
It’s a simple task I thought. I’ll just add a widget for my Amazon Wish List. Easy as can be right? Wrong! Apparently no one out there has made anything even Amazon related since WordPress 1.5, let alone a widget version. So a pre-made widget is out. What can I make myself? Well, Amazon has to provide some way for people to find a wishlist. So I spend way too long reading through some Amazon SDK shit, looking for a way to make a wishlist into an RSS feed, or something else usable. Hours later I find out that if you LOG OUT of Amazon, there’s a friggin RSS icon on the top of your wishlist. YOU don’t get to see it, it’s not available to YOU. But anyone else in the world can easily see it. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long time. But wait, it gets better. The RSS feed from Amazon is “special”, which means it’s Amazon’s own special brew of dumb. I tried 4 different RSS readers, 3 of them didn’t work. Finally, I got it to show up in Thunderbird. So, using that exact URL, the one that worked, I added a simple little RSS reader widget, and put that as the feed. Does it work? NO! As you can see, I added it to my sidebar. Anything come up? Nope. For testing purposes I put a text link immediately below that. That takes you directly to the feed without a problem, yet somehow it’s not a valid feed according to WordPress. Where the hell am I, the friggin Twilight Zone? This is retarded. It’s an RSS feed! Arrrrrrrrgggggggg!
UPDATE:
Screw it. Deleted the broken RSS widgets. Now there is a button. Screw the internet.
Nagle, being the awesome guy he is, was kind enough to hook me up with an invite to ffffound yesterday. I’m actually enjoying the service quite a bit. I find it to be almost a Digg + Flickr + Pandora kind of thing. You can select images you like off the front page and add them to your own collection or you can wonder the net, find an image you like, and add it to the collective. I find it very inspiring as a photographer, to see so much good work collected all in one place.
While ffffound is incredibly awesome in concept, it does seem to have a few technical draw backs that I hope they get ironed out before coming out of their closed beta. First on my list simply has to be the very odd image size bug. When you post a huge photo to ffffound, it shrinks it down to a more post appropriate size. When you find an image that isn’t so large, it tells you that it isn’t large enough to be posted. I found this to be the problem with 99% of the images on Flickr. Some of the images from my variousfavoriteFlickrfeeds weren’t large enough for posting BUT are, on the average, larger than the reduced size that ffffound uses. If you’re going to resize everything to be approximately 420×420, why on earth would a 480×480 image be too small? For example, I find the work of Tom McFarlane to be fairly interesting, if not amazing. Almost all the images in his photostream are larger than some of the small images on the front page of ffffound, but yet I can’t share them.
What compounds this problem is the fact that on the “how to” page, no mention of photo requirements is given at all. If they’re looking for a minimum size, I’d love to know what the actual dimensions are. All the page describes is that you can click on something to fav it, and that installing the bookmarklet is recommended.
Another small technicality is that of friends/followers. Either I’m completely retarded and can’t find the option to add friends or there simply isn’t one. If there isn’t, why does it say, underneith my screen name, that “I have no followers”. There is a short list of “favorite users” towards the bottom, but that’s comprised of people who’s ffffound lists I’ve added things off of, which is great if that person constantly uploads good stuff, but sometimes it’s a one-off and I really don’t care about their list of photos in general.
The last thing, which I’m sure they’re working on, is the if/then recommendation engine. As it is, I’m being recommended this image 3 times on my “found list“. Problem is, it too is already on my list. Why would an image I’ve already added to my favorites bother showing up in the list of “things I might also like”? Of course I like it… I just added it. Do they want me to add it again or something?
Like I said at the top, it’s a great little service, one I’m going to continue to use and will probably be a decent source of inspiration down the road. They’ve got a lot of kinks to work out, but if they pull it off, it’ll be a great site.
Oh, and if you want to check out my found photo stream, here it is…
That’s what setting up an ical remote calendar feels like. Mozilla Sunbird and Thunderbird (with the Lightning plugin) are supposed to “publish to a remote server via FTP” when you hit the “publish calendar” button. Unfortunatly for those of us in the real word, it doesn’t work like that. Not only does it not work, but there are no instructions on how to make it work. So, I start poking around the server and the calendar application, wondering what the hell I’m suppose to do. I finally figured it out, but only after giving myself a migraine in the process. In case you’re wondering, here’s how…
-Download and install Sunbird, or Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin.
-Start either program and make a new blank calendar. For this example, we’ll call ours “Work Schedule”.
-Right click on the calendar and select “export”.
-Save you calendar as an *ics file. Remember not to use uppercase letters or spaces.
-Open up an FTP client of your choosing and connect to wherever you’re going to be remotely storing your calendar.
-Upload your blank calendar, in this case named simply “work.ics” to a safe directory ABOVE your web directory (above www)
-CHMOD the calendar file to 777 and close your FTP client.
-Open Sunbird/TB again and select File -> Subscribe to remote calendar.
-For the location, put in “ftp://ftp_username:ftp_password@yourserver.com/work.ics”
-If all goes well, you should be subscribed to a readable/writeable blank remote calendar.
Also, you can now safely delete the default “Home” calendar now that you have a second one. Both programs require at least one calendar by default. Try it out, add a few items and see how it goes. As of the latest version of SB/TB, the changes to your calendar should be uploaded/updated automatically. If you have multiple users updating the same calendar, it would be wise to right click the calendar and select “refresh calendar” before making any changes.
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