First of all, thanks to everyone who has pointed out that there is now a warning from Google about how dangerous ‘MaxPower.ca’ is. I hadn’t noticed. Apparently, if you link to malware sites than your site is also considered malware. So all that needs to happen is that you get a bit of spam that makes its way past the filters and viola, your site is malware worthy. This is what I think has happened here. » Read the rest of the entry..

Plagiarize me once, shame on you. Plagiarize me twice, shame on me.

On Halloween I filed two DMCA notices with the Google Adsense program. My goal was simple, stop known plagiarists from profiting from my words. Yesterday, Google got back to me regarding the notices I faxed in:

We have received your DMCA complaint dated 10/31/06. We are currently reviewing the complaint and will contact you when we have completed processing the request.

We appreciate your patience during this time.

Regards,
The Google AdSense Team

Today, I checked the two sites I caught stealing from me and I could not find a single Adsense ad. I did see the spaces where the ads used to be. » Read the rest of the entry..

Abstract

33Rockers.com is a website created, written, and developed by Karthik Kastury — or at least that’s what he’d have you believe. His website has risen in the ranks and gained some notoriety since it’s inception due to the quality and insightful articles published online. Turns out that Karthik Kastury has been stealing not only other people’s words, but their blog designs as well.

The following post is written in the spirit of education. By making an example and exposing Karthik Kastury for the plagarising blogger that he is, I hope that others can learn why his actions prove not only unprofitable today, but stupid in the long run due to pagespank as a result of public shaming. I hope other bloggers learn that stealing content and claiming it as your own original work is foolish and possibly detrimental to your future career.

Full Text

Karthik Kastury is a plagiarist. Consider his most recent post, “The Hottest Map Based Mashups” posted on November 2, 2006. Here is a small snippet:

Of late, map mashups, applications based on on-line map services, have gained considerable attention. A map mashup integrates user-data on top of a geographical map pulled from an on-line map service such as Google maps and Yahoo! Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/). Several such applications are being rolled out daily.

Wow. Pretty good stuff. Unfortunately, its been stolen from an article entitled, “Location-enabled webfeed holds promis,” found at www.m-indya.com. The original author is one J. Murali and he posted his article on October 30th, 2006. Here is a snippet from his article: » Read the rest of the entry..

My parents have the cutest dog ever. Bold assertion, but its the truth. The dog, Leo, has black fur so soft that girls can’t stop petting him — and he loves it. When he wakes in the morning he groans like an old man, rolls over and literally tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes while he awaits his tummy being rubbed. If he wants attention, he will come right up to you and put his head on your lap and stare with soul melting eyes until you give in to his demands. He prefers ice cubes from a scotch glass and will knock the glass to ask for some.

Imagine going through life with the ability to make everyone you see happy instantly, Leo posses this gift. The only thing that is not perfect about him is that he gets a little worried when people leave. He likes companionship so when my parents leave their house the dog will sometimes have a lot of nervous energy.

Recently, while my parents were out, he started to chew on a book they had purchased. When they got home, this is how they found the book: » Read the rest of the entry..

If you’ve ever tried to use the popular image manager plugin or the digital fingerprint plugin at the same time as the immensely popular Adsense Deluxe plugin then you’ll have probably run across a perplexing problem: some buttons won’t show up in the post and page editor. Seemingly, Adsense Deluxe doesn’t play nice with the ButtonSnap Class Library created by Owen Winkler. ButtonSnap makes it relatively easy for plugin authors to insert customized buttons into the WordPress post and page editor regardless of the users editor preference (WYSIWYG vs rich editor). For an example of how this works see the Sawchuk Buttons plugin and the corresponding Tutorial on how to write your own button functions using ButtonSnap.

With hundreds of plugin writers and authors contributing to the WordPress community there is bound to be some conflicts between plugins. The method that the Adsense Deluxe plugin uses to create it’s button in the WordPress post and page editor stops any plugin which uses the ButtonSnap class library from producing it’s own button in the editor. The two just don’t work together.

In order to get around this, I suggest a simple workaround to the Adsense Deluxe plugin until a more suitable solution can be found: disable the part of Adsense deluxe plugin that produces the button in the post editor. Its easy: » Read the rest of the entry..

WordPress 2.0.5 is here. The latest version’s changes are discussed here, and I’ll put a link to the unofficial dif upgrade when I find it here. Congratulations to the WordPress team.

Thank Mark Jaquith for providing only the changed files for those of us going form 2.0.4 to 2.0.5.

I created a custom search engine using Google Co-op for helping me with my (various) WordPress problems and thought that maybe others would be interested as well. Right now it only index’s 3 websites: the official WordPress Codex and support forums, and the WP-Hackers email list archives. I find that the vast majority of my queries come from those sites, so this search makes a lot of sense.

Feel free to let me know if there are other sites to add.

Recently, I wrote a post thanking a few individuals who had tipped me off to some potential problems this website was having. One of the problems was a plagiarism issue — a website had gone and copied a page right off of maxpower and posted it on their own site chocked full of ads (images and all). I contacted the owner of the site, requested it be taken down and got a quick reply and apology and it was removed. Problem solved right?

Wrong! The post is back up, same address as before. This is both shameful and stupid! Imagine for a moment you got caught red handed stealing. You say sorry, but then go right back at it again — only this time with more vigor! The plagiarist learned nothing so its time to bust out a lesson plan…

Consider what would happen if I were to publish the details here on MaxPower including name, website, screencaptures of what has transpired, the emails, all for the world to see (and index) how the content thief operates. Google is all knowing and not very forgiving. Future employers searching this prospective employee’s name would in all likelihood find the maxpower page at the top of the list (dare we term this idea… pagespank?). All for a little adsense scratch. Stupid.

Then again, I should have suspected this was going to happen. Here was the thief’s original reply to my request to remove the stolen pages:

ok i do it

That’s the entire email, word for word.
[more to follow as it develops]