Can someone please explain the purpose of the theft of content perpetrated by this site (original here) and some others, like this post on a Movable Type blog (original here). Or this page, which seems to copy from this one.
Really, what does “Jessica Simpson in a g-string” have to do with anything? I rarely post pictures of Jessica Simpson here. I don’t even think I would recognize her if I saw her.
It seems that it’s so easy to set up a WordPress site that everyone’s doing it - even the spammers. Assuming your ping/trackbacks are working, theft is a really simple way to generate targeted content and get a link from your site. Assuming the IP addresses of these sites are attached to fresh hosting servers, they’re probably not going to be in any blacklists, which makes them harder to filter. Even so, I can’t figure out how they plan on making money from it.
Are they cloaking from Google? Are there ads on the site? Some yes, some no. What crafty and ingenious scheme have they figured out to make money now? It’s the only valid motivation I can see, since simply copying someone else’s content seems like such a waste of time.
To prevent this type of abuse, an advanced spam filter could check a trackback site for plagiarized content using some kind of differencing algorithm, and then block trackbacks that exceed a threshhold of duplication. Seems like a lot of work to me. Are we better off to just block trackbacks altogether? And that doesn’t stop the original theft, the purpose of which is still sketchy to me.
And to think - I thought that the days of spam were coming to a close back in February or so. Then the comment spam pace picked up again (ineffectually), and now I’ve already heard more about this new thing than I care to. Where will the madness end?
I think I may have mentioned this before but I should state it again while I’m thinking about it: This site is not licensed under a Creative Commons license. You must request permission to reproduce anything you find on this site.
Violators will be publicly exposed in their underwear, among other unfortunate consequences.
