Scraper Security

Bloggers pretty much have to accept that scraper sites will steal their blog’s content without permission for their own ends. It happens all the time and if they don’t just ignore it, then it can eat up far too much time as you worry about it and chase up the offenders asking them to cease and desist. Avoiding the hassle was part of the reason I added a Creative Commons license to Sciencetext.com, saves me the trouble.

But every now and then, a scraper will use your content in a more creative way than is acceptable and basically recreate a new version of your site; that’s not really on, it’s called passing off and I’ve had at least three sites shut down for such a crime. Other sites are just put together sloppily so that you end up with your Google Webmaster Tools error pages filling up with references to the broken links they produce because the scraper referred to non-existent entry points on your site.

I contacted one site that had generated such broken links recently. They were quite happy to remove the site from theirs, which is a shame, because I only wanted them to fix the links, to be honest. They weren’t doing anything too offensive with my work, after all, and it may have generated some new traffic.

It occurred to me, however, after they took my email to heart, that anyone could have approached them with the exact same complaint about any of the sites they were runnin. Anyone…not necessarily me…I could have been an impostor with malicious intent looking to get a site deleted.

Most web forms and actionable systems on the net have some kind of verification to stop impostors subscribing or unsubscribing other people’s accounts. But, when a human is involved, it’s down to discretion and that’s when gamers and social engineers must rub their hands in glee.

I mentioned this to the webmaster who responded to my initial email, and they suggested, probably quite rightly, that I was being paranoid. They admitted they hadn’t actually checked out the email, they had simply assumed that it really was me asking them to fix the links. The webmaster went so far as to say that they “trust people by default.”

In this day and age with hackers, crackers, spammers and scammers everywhere you look, it is not a sensible stance to take. Despite one’s own integrity there are always people out there hoping to take advantage. Thoughts of game theory and humanity’s upward and onward progression are totally irrelevant, I’m afraid, if someone has an ace up their sleeve or loaded dice in their pocket.