Techspec [dot] Online and others are copying my post titles word for word and content
I would like them to stop
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Update: since I originally wrote this one of the sites has changed a few words in the post so it is no longer a one to one replica, but they are still copying the content and sabotaging this blog. The title is still replicated and my name is on the post. It is still affecting my blog and I am working on contacting the proper people to take it down.
You may not want to visit these sites unless you have a secure way to do so.
Here are some sites that are plagiarizing my medium content. I’m sure there are others. It’s easy to find them. Search for my last name and some other unique words in the post title and they will show up. Anything you can do to help report these sites with the mechanisms below is greatly appreciated.
- levitrares [dot] com
- techspec [dot] online
- news.clateway [dot] com
It’s super annoying when people copy your content word for word and repost it. I would really like this site to stop doing that.
Here are some of the stories these sites are targeting to apparently redirect all traffic for them to themselves from Google search engine rankings (This may change as I’ve reported them through multiple Google channels below):
Since I have written this post they have changed the titles and links to hide what they are doing.
There is a copyright at the bottom of all my posts — except this one. Feel free to repost this one on your site so everyone who runs across your site can see what you are doing with other people’s content if you are automatically stealing other people’s content.
Where to report plagiarism, web spam, and nefarious links
I figured out how to report copyright infringement specifically to get legal help from Google:
I have reported this to Google and hopefully Medium Staff can take a look and contact them as it is also impacting Medium content.
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How Google handles these is pretty cool. You can see updates on their dashboard. So far at the time of updating this post, one has been removed.
Go to this page while logged into your Google account to see what you have submitted.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-dashboard?hl=en&pid=0&complaint_type=1
Unfortunately they made a mistake on one I reported and are saying it is not in the index when it clearly is. I’m going to resubmit and see if it gets fixed. Maybe I made a mistake:
I came back later and the page says the items have been removed and the flag that says they are not in the index is now zero instead of one, so I’m not sure what “not in index” means. Meanwhile, I found a copy of the same page that was supposedly taken down via a different search. I submitted it and now that new submission shows up as not in index when it is:
I can get to the URL by searching on “cannot pass spaces [name of site]”
cloudformation deploy — parameter-overrides
So…there is still work to do here. It is unfortunate that the offending page cannot be completely removed for blatant and repeated copyright offenses.
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You can report webspam here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform
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About the offending sites and trying to get them to remove the content….
Whois record (you can get this from https://whois.sc or related sites)
They are using a company called Porkbun’s Private By Design service:
Private [dot] Design
On Twitter @ Porkbun.
Parent company of Porkbun is Top Level Design @ TLD on Twitter.
Shortly after reporting this the same content showed up on another site who has since taken down offending content (thank you).
When I look up the IP address for this site I get:
And then search for the IP address in ARIN and I get:
I’m not sure what EIG has to do with the above site or why it would be hosted on their address space. EIG is actually an interesting investment company. I wonder if their network is somehow being abused. Maybe this is related to one of their investments. EIG is located in Burlington, MA according to the above. The tech contact for the domain is Toronto. The IP location reports Utah.
The site is hosted at a Unified Layer location, which is a colocation company. I’ve seen this name in my logs before associated with scammer traffic. What is interesting is that when you go to their website all it has is an abuse message:
Yeah, I’m sure that emailing that email is going to be really helpful. Just like the automated response I got from porkbun that wants you to jump thorough a bunch of hopes that probably go nowhere.
The only place you should see my posts at this time are:
https://medium.com/cloud-security
https://medium.com/bugs-that-bite
I have subsequently learned that the pages were reposted using Medium RSS feeds.
Follow for updates.
Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2022
About Teri Radichel:
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