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..

Hi, the following text is meaningless. Please ignore it. I’m sorry for the interruption in normally meaningful communication. » Read the rest of the entry..

Typhoid Mary (aka Mary Mallon) was was the first identified healthy carrier of typhoid in the US. While she did not die from typhoid, she passed the disease to others who then became infected and died. Throughout most of her life, she denied her role in the deaths of those infected by her. Today the term ‘Typhoid Mary’ has come to mean a carrier of a dangerous disease who is a danger to the public because they refuse to take appropriate precautions.

Kanga.nu is a typhoid mary. This Plone site has a major security vulnerability which allows malicious users to create URL’s on the site that then forward visitors to a new page. Here is how it works:

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Executive Summary (with updates 23/06/06):

JWT (a marketing firm) and ‘The Huffington Post’ (a popular blog) have teamed up to market and promote a series of advertisments. On June 20th I received an email sugesting the readers of this blog would enjoy one of the JWT advertisements. On June 20th the YesButNoButYes blog received a very similar email suggesting that their readers would enjoy one of the JWT ads promoted at The Huffington Post. The marketing dept at the Huffington Post is run by a well known viral marketing pioneer. All emails came from the same IP. At the same time, comments on the JWT ads are limited to only the positive variety (with the approval rate estimated for some ads at about 3%). In the latest twist, a comment by Val over at the YesButNoButYes blog brags about how much more popular The Huffington Post when compared with YesButNoButYes. This comment originates from the same IP as all the emails sugesting we promote the JWT ads as well as the short reply to this story by Jonah Peretti. All this ads up to viral marketing Foie Gras.
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The following is a piece of spam I received today. Due to the anti spam set up I use here at MaxPower, I am sure that this comment was hand written by a real human. It was posted on my social bookmarking page. In it Charles asks some good questions. Here we go:

Hello

I just got an email about an ebook download(for sale) about how to profit from bookmark sites.
But, before i go rushing to link up, I must ask what a website needs to be, before it is seen as a winner. I realise writing an article which is informative and useful before it can get bookmarked.

How about the site itself, should it have certain requirement before being considered?.

I would like a review from you if possible to see if my site might be seen as being good or adequate.

I am in need of some traffic and how to go about doing the right things to achieve it through bookmaker sites. It is difficult to get an idea of how to make it more exciting to visitors in an article.

Your honest opinions will be much apreciated

I hope I am not asking too much

charles

Here is my reply: » Read the rest of the entry..

Update June 25, 2006: The operator of the website in question asked me to remove the text references to his site. Apparently, this page is near the top of the SERPS for the company name. I don’t want to needless hurt any company and the point of this article isn’t that company X did something bad. By removing the name of the comapny I have taken none of the substance from this article and have hopefully helped some honest people continue earn their livlihood.

When I get a free moment, I often look over my server logs to see whats happening and where my traffic is actually coming from. Today I found a strange spike in traffic as shown in the image below:

The thing that is odd with those stats is that the number of ‘pages’ doesn’t equal the number of ‘hits’. In fact, often its not even that close. So I visited a couple of those pages. They look like this: » Read the rest of the entry..

Thank god the screaming Scot will no longer be yelling at me when I watch hockey. Turns out he likes the kiddie porn and (if proven guilty) will go to jail, where they don’t like people who like kids. Anyway, I always knew something was wrong… » Read the rest of the entry..

The idea that NASA let a 24-year-old journalism major, with no experience in science or technology, other than writing a few articles about video games, determine what scientists were able to communicate to the public was pretty bad.

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