Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

A month ago I wrote about how you can effectively remove unauthorized content from web sites, under the threat of a DMCA notice.

The process is simple, straightforward and as long as you provide the necessary information to the legal department of the host providing the server space, it will work regardless of content.

The idea, however, is not to shut down an offending web site, unless they do not comply with the notification delivered by their host. Often, it’s not even necessary to notify the offending web site to take your content down – you can go directly to their web host and complain.

Such content-scraping web sites can sprout like mushrooms all over the place.

The main problem is not the scrapers but rather, the specialized web sites that portray themselves as magazines or portals in the same niche market that you are. These, are the ones worthy of a DMCA notice and in the past week there have been two such instances I dealt with, both successfully.

The bottom line is this: nobody should be copying your content due to lack of writing skills or in order to benefit from material you wrote. Publishing content on the Internet gives you the copyright and the offending copycats can be effectively taken down.

Follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

When I sent my first email while in college in the late 80’s, we didn’t even call them such. They were “network messages“; few of us had access to the gateway that would send these messages outside of the local network and into the wild unknown. In fact, there was nothing of interest out there, until the early 90’s.

But enough with these old tales. Roll forward a couple of decades and email is as common as picking up the phone. At times, it’s faster to communicate via email than by phone, as it can be delivered through several media.

The problem is of course, spam - the sheer amount of junk email that ends up clogging your mailbox. Nowadays, there are several methods to block email spam effectively, including filters and even forwarding through Gmail that seems to catch a lot of it.

But what about comment spam on blogs?

For blogs that run Wordpress, you should enable Akismet as soon as you set up your blog, although unfortunately it doesn’t keep the spammers away; the comments are sent to your spam queue along with several false positives. You still have to go through the queue to read them.

On a given day, I get 75 to almost 100 spam comments sent to the spam queue. I used to skim through them to see if anything was caught by mistake but after a while it became tedious.

So I tried installing various captcha plugins that were forcing commentators to enter a jumbled up code into a form field along with their message. Aside from being an extra inconvenience to those wanting to leave a comment, the captchas were cracked in 3 days by various spambots peddling cheap pharmaceuticals, flooding my mailbox like wild jellyfish in an old port’s waters.

The solution?

The single most important Wordpress plugin that will effectively block all spam from ever reaching the queue, is called WP-SpamFree and it works wonders. It has various parameters to do what you ask it to do; you don’t have to worry about how it does it, but it works.

Having tested WP-SpamFree at the recent traffic onslaught of DomainGang.com after a post made Digg’s homepage, the plugin logged no less than 350 spam comments that never made the spam queue. These blind spambots released their scummy digital farts into the air, never reaching the DomainGang.com database. Not a single false positive!

Download it, install it, and forget about comment spam for good. And while you’re at it, follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/acroplex

I’m a big fan of Pauly Shore.

From the era of MTV to Encino Man, Son in Law, In the Army Now to Jury Duty and the mega-flop Bio-Dome, Pauly Shore often appeared next to other up and coming Hollywood comedians.

The 40-something comedian’s career abruptly stalled in the mid 90’s.

The reason?

The Hollywood studios didn’t want to make family comedies anymore, they wanted action-packed, superhero-driven mega-movies that instead of producing safe revenues in the $25 to $40 million range, they’d be aiming for the $100+ million figures. Soon though, people would be asking for real comedy, not plastic, pre-processed “funny lines” tossed in-between punches and CGI.

Pauly Shore has a distinct style and he’s active on twitter as well. I love the guy, he kept it going despite the career downfall and since the mid 2000’s he’s been on the rebound with several funny and serious roles on the TV and the movies.

Pauly’s recent cameo appearance in Experian’s educational series about credit, titled “The Funny Truth about Credit” made me take a good look into what Experian – one of the three credit bureaus – is trying to achieve.

In this series, Experian is using famous actors in short movies, providing a humorous, entertaining and educational approach to what constitutes good credit practices. The idea is unique and the message is passed through quick, sharp dialogue that appeals both to the fans of the actors and those that want to learn more about credit and how it affects our daily lives.

With DomainGang – the only daily entertainment magazine catering to domainers – I strive to deliver humor, insight and a thought-provoking analysis of the domain industry.

When large corporations like Experian utilize humor as their promotional tool, it’s important to see this as a lesson that thinking outside the box is what is needed; regurgitating news and information is tiring and uninteresting.

Down in 90 minutes. Don't fuck with the Gang.

I’ve been writing essays and stories since I was five or six years old.

During the past 35 years, I’ve used my ability to form words into intelligent passages for a number of purposes: winning contests, writing books, engaging in journalism in both English and my native language of Greek.

Being protective of one’s literary work is a must, if one wants to retain control of it for financial and managerial purposes. Being quoted in publications, interviews or in excerpts of works of others all constitute fair use; especially when they are accompanied with references – and in our times, with backlinks.

People that resort to copying the work of others not only show a lack of ability to express their ideas, theses and arguments in writing but they also display a complete lack of ethos. The act of stealing, when not explicitly described as such from a young age, can only lead to recurring instances of thievery; an act that in the mind of the wrong-doer is not wrong or worthy of a punishment.

Ergo, the situation earlier today with a person who was caught red-handed stealing entire posts from my project, DomainGang.com – they also stole content from Chef Patrick, Bruce Marler, Shane Cultra, Elliot Silver and other domain bloggers.

Fortunately, these days the process is straightforward and more or less uniform. With the majority of web hosts located in Western countries, the ability to streamline the process of issuing a complaint is a pleasant positive in an ocean of Internet anarchy.

So what would you do if someone is copying or ripping your work and posts it elsewhere as their own?

Your first step would be to find out who they are; an easy task if you are dealing with a web site residing on a domain. Use DomainTools.com to find their contact address and email them, explaining that your content belongs to you and that you have not given them the right to replicate it. If their email address bounces as invalid, inform their Registrar and in the meantime, resolve the IP of their domain. You can do that by opening a command console in Windows and issuing the ping domainname.com command.

If they respond with a positive attitude and remove the content per your instructions, your mission ends here. If they fail to respond or email you back with a snobby, pompous attitude as in our case tonight, it’s time to get serious.

Take that domain’s IP and visit ARIN and enter it in the ‘Search WHOIS” box on the top right. It will return the network responsible for managing that IP. It’s the absolute “god” over whoever is copying your content and have full authority over turning them on and off.

That same page will show you which email acts as the “Abuse department” for the network in question. Visit their web site to locate any references to the DMCA – the digital millennium copyright act that serves as the group of guidelines against copyright infringement online.

Some companies managing networks have their own layout for reporting copyright violations; most, however, outline the necessary items in order to report a violation and substantiate an actionable DMCA complaint.

In the case that I dealt with today, I got in touch with Nobis Technology Group LLC who outlines the DMCA complaint process on their web site.

I gathered screenshots of the offensive content and saved them as PDF files using a great utility called NovaPDF that can create PDF files from anything that can be printed.

Then, following the DMCA complaint instructions I wrote up this email, that you can use as a generic template, free of charge

This complaint of a DMCA violation is being brought against the holder of the domain name, [DOMAIN VIOLATOR] and its web site, hosted on the IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx which belongs to the network of [COMPANY YOU'RE COMPLAINING TO]

The web site replicates content produced exclusively for and appearing on [YOUR DOMAIN]

The material on [DOMAIN VIOLATOR] which references [YOUR DOMAIN] have not been authorized for reproduction in any shape or form. The owner of [DOMAIN VIOLATOR] is including our content simply as a means of monetizing his traffic via Google Adsense or other ads.

The owner of [DOMAIN VIOLATOR] has been notified of this violation and has refused to proceed with removing the content in a timely fashion. The email communication is included at the very end of this email to [COMPANY YOU'RE COMPLAINING TO]

[INSERT ACTUAL LINKS TO COPIED CONTENT AND ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM YOUR DOMAIN HERE]

Our contact information:

[INSERT YOUR FULL ADDRESS, EMAIL AND PHONE HERE]

Statements:

[YOUR DOMAIN] – the Complaining Party – has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and

The information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that [YOUR DOMAIN] – the Complaining Party – is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Signed this day of [DATE]

[SIGN WITH YOUR NAME AND LOCATION]

In the case of the offender, it took 90 minutes from the moment I filed a DMCA complaint until they suspended his account. In the meantime, he had started changing the RSS feeds, still displaying full copies of our content and eventually deleted some of it; unfortunately, many web hosting companies have zero tolerance to offenses of this kind.

In a nutshell, a message to content scrapers: don’t do it, kids. Spend some time sharpening your own skills or find something else you’re good at. Stealing is a crime and criminals are taken down.

In my very early days as a domainer, not having much feedback or guidance from experienced professionals, I thought it was cool that I had registered the .com of an existing company that for some odd reason chose to use the .net

So nonchalantly, I did the obvious: contacted them and offered it for sale. The only problem: the exact term was a registered trademark.

The company president responded that he could barely afford the trademark, let alone pay for the .com at open market prices. The story ended there, the .net was eventually dropped and the trademark died.

Ten years later, I still own the .com but I learned a useful lesson.

Namejet auctions off unpaid domains registered with Network Solutions, eNom and a couple of other registrars. In doing so, domains that were registered in the early days of the Internet are being released into a public bidding which then turns private. Several worthy domains are being auctioned daily; some have traffic or a history – having belonged to companies until their recent past.

A lot of these domains are byproducts of mergers, acquisitions or corporate dissolutions. Quite a few are the result of expirations due to broken emails, forgotten passwords or neglect.

What’s even more alarming is the amount of trademark domains that are entered into the public and private auctions, daily. Literally dozens of aged, quality domains that when checked against a single database – that of the USPTO – can be found in a multitude of formats.

From my observations, many domains that have expired have trademark applications that are pending a decision or were recently applied for. Regardless of their obvious status, several domainers – some of which would be considered “repeat offenders” – are bidding serious chunks of money that far exceed the safety figure of a UDRP cost.

Also, companies that have pending trademarks are actively pursuing these domains at the drop, by bidding against domainers and although they are prepared to pay a premium price for them, should not be confused with easy recipients of a domain flip.

A small number of individuals that habitually catch these domains at Namejet auctions, act with the intention to resell them to trademark holders. A particularly notorious one is actually sending out letters of intent to these companies, informing them that he will be able to bid on their behalf against “cybersquatters” – clearly, the epitome of a weasel scum domainer.

Simply because you can chase after trademark domains, don’t do it. The risk well outweighs the benefits.

As I’m battling a rather nasty case of flu, I can’t but think of the great time I had at TRAFFIC Las Vegas. The change of guard, from Rick Schwartz to Rick Latona, came with several challenges that in my opinion were handled efficiently and with utmost class.

For starters, Rick Latona’s energy and “go get them” attitude permeated throughout the conference. Rick’s decision to pause and restart the crashed live auction the following day, was the proper action and enforced “damage control”. The auction platform presented some programming challenges that I am certain they’ll be ironed out in time for next TRAFFIC.

The networking sessions were superb, although the twist to the musical chairs introduced by Rick Silver was a bit too much, in my opinion. The zig-zagging added intensity and by the end of the session my voice, like that of others, was gone. Still, an interesting way to break the ice on the starting day; and a reminder for me to bring twice as many business cards with me the next time.

Jodi Chamberlain – event coordinator – was truly superb in every way. Not only did she ensure everyone got going around the conference’s halls but she went far beyond any “call of duty” to keep us happy. She truly seems to enjoy her job, possesses a great sense of humor and a lot of energy in her remarkably minute stature.

As a side-note, Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu seemed to enjoy their assumed role of observers versus organizers of an event that started six years ago as invite only. They were very cordial and far more relaxed than at the previous TRAFFIC conference that I attended in Orlando, in 2008.

Once again, thank you, Rick and Jodi – a job well done.

The devastation from the earthquake that hit Haiti cannot yet be assessed; some fear that 50,000 people might be dead and thousands more injured.

In today’s interconnected world, with each natural or man-made catastrophe the descriptive terms are the first ones to be searched on the Internet; currently people all over the world are interested in finding out what is going on in Haiti and would like to make donations.

However, Haiti.com is being used as a tourism portal to the Caribbean, as it forwards to the domain COL.com. The bright colors of the COL.com web page are in stark contrast with the grim situation in Haiti, where buildings lay in rubble and blood-drenched corpses are being brought out from under the debris.

In a similar fashion, Donations.com and its co-owned Donations.org do not resolve at all. Owned by some corporation based in Switzerland, both generics would play a major role in directing traffic en masse to temporary portals created for the particular devastation.

Unfortunately, the opposite happens currently, as opportunists have already registered domain names related to the earthquake that hit Haiti and are listing them on various venues, including eBay and Sedo.

These are not noble attempts to direct donations but an attempt to collect – or, extort – money from organizations that exist or would be formed in order to rebuild Haiti.

Essentially, the only place to donate through which guarantees an efficient processing of the donations, is the Red Cross. And please note, that’s at RedCross.org as the .com – owned by the Red Cross – ironically appears to be down.