Does anyone know about these websites? It seems my text is being copied and pasted.elsewhere.
Posted on: October 22, 2010 - 6:06pm
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Does anyone know about these websites? It seems my text is being copied and pasted.elsewhere.
I stumbled on these two websites. I do understand that other people can use the same handle but this disturbs me. I understand it is possible for others to happen to use the same name, but blocks and blocks of my full posts from here are being copied and pasted on these sites and I don't belong to those sites.
http://connect.oregonlive.com/user/Brian37/comments-oldest.html
and
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
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Huh. I guess you should be flattered?
It looks like someone is using your responses as canned replies to newspaper letter to the editor.
You might try contacting the websites and asking that the user be banned, but I'm not sure about the legality of forum plagiarism... I doubt there is any recourse short of the sites voluntarily blocking the user.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Maybe you sleep post
____________________________________________________________
"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.
I found some Cpt_pineapple accounts that don't belong to me before.
Brian is probably a common name.
It seems like the "LIVE" part of the url is a family of related sites because they also have a Penn(as in the state) "LIVE" as well. Maybe I signed up somewhere on one and posted once and it automatically gets tracked by the others.
But what doesn't make sense are that my individual posts are unrelated and were posted at different websites uninvolved with a "LIVE" website I might have signed up for.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
The name aspect I get. But no, those are my posts, I remember writing them. Maybe those family of sites are tracking sites. If not, someone is logging on as me and copying my posts, which would mean I have a stalker.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Same thing is also on clevelandlive.com
Looks to me like they are interconnected sites. If you click the topic where the comment is found on SIlive that is Believers Respond......, it takes you to the Cleveland site.
____________________________________________________________
"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.
All these sites are part of this company - http://www.advanceinternet.com/
____________________________________________________________
"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.
It's basically spam. They're using a technique to boost some site's google ranking by posting a whole bunch of random material stolen from around the web, in order to trick google into thinking that *real* sites are linking to some specific site. If you report them to google, you might be able to get google to de-list them. Unfortunately, like spam, you toss one in the trash and a dozen more pop up 5 minutes later. These people have no idea who Brian37 is, and it probably wasn't even a person, but a bot-spider/crawler that collected the random postings. I wouldn't worry too much about it. It would take a lot more energy to deal with it than it's worth.
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I can't vouch for the silive site but the oregonlive.com site is the Portland Oregon newspaper web site and it is valid. It is called The Oregonian on paper - if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see the name.
I did not copy your posts there. I have accounts on oregonlive.com but not using the name cj - and there are way too many other cj's to make an easy search to check if any of my posts from this forum are copied there. Contact them - tell them you did not authorize the comments. They have been very good about not spreading my information around and I have a job search account there.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Brian, check your private messages.
This is most likely canned spam. But it could be real spam as well (check to see if there are any links hidden in the text).
Actually, I know of one company that even uses an automatic text generator that spiders competing web sites for input to make it sound closer to the correct topic. Then when they open up a new forum, they actually register it a few months before it goes live and they populate it with fairly close to real looking posts. Done that way, it is fairly hard to tell that it is a new forum populated by bots only.
Then, when people start posting, they let the bots answer. If the questions are simple enough, the original poster might even get answers that are close enough to work for them.
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This reminds me a bit of an annoying intrusion on my internet identity - someone has taken over my oldest email address, that I don't use any more.
I receive messages from that address, to me via the same address (!?).
All spam, mostly pushing Viagra.
There are also a few labelled "Find a Russian wife here."
All with my old address in the 'from' field.
I did mention it to my original ISP and they admitted it happens, but thought it was pretty hard to do anything about it.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
You do know the "from" address doesn't have to be a real address? And it was probably gleaned long ago from someone's address book and is still in the spamer's address book.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Yeah, but it is annoying that my old address is being spread around as a spam source.
Its obviously closely related to the fact that it was my first address, and is now the one which is on most spammers lists, and is the incoming one on which I receive by far the majority of the spam.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
Yah, I gave brian a hackers trick that might be useful later on .
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This is one of the reasons I tend to agree with real/true ID systems. South Korea doesn't have so many problems like this- they can actually enforce certain kinds of banning and spam laws (and it's heaven for online video game developers- trivial to block out hackers).
The only other way we're going to be able to stop this kind of thing is by creating a barrier to entry; such as charging a penny to send e-mails, a dollar to register an account, etc.- nothing would reduce the volume of spam faster than a barrier to entry, even one trivial for anybody sending a sane amount of e-mail daily.
The best system is arguably one involving "deposits", where the charge could be refunded- say, $5 to send an e-mail to some new address the first time or register to a new place- then when the recipient checks it, if it's not spam, they can click a button to refund the deposit. Compounded with a government backed account recovery system (some real ID number that could be used optionally to assist in account recovery), spam could be killed pretty quickly.
I'd probably vote for almost any politician with a reasonable anti-Spam policy. I hope it starts becoming more of an issue once this silly definition of marriage and anti abortion stuff dies down.