Entrap: To lure into performing a previously or otherwise uncontemplated illegal act.

With the recent release of AntiLeech, an anti splog plugin for WordPress by Owen Winkler, there finally exists a real method of fighting back against content scraping thieves. AntiLeech is a plugin for WordPress that attempts to serve up fake content to known splogs. The plugin identifies splogs by either their User-Agents or IP address (user supplied). From the plugin page:

What does AntiLeech do? AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. No, it does better than that. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them.

AntiLeech also offer up the option of creating custom content to serve up only to splog bots. This option is how I now wildly progistcate on how to entrap would be splogers. By using AntiLeech, a splog will publish on their site a fake piece of content that you or I write. This content can be anything….

Consider: sploggers splog for money. They put advertisements (like Adsense) next to the stolen content in the hopes that surfers will click on them as they read the stolen content. When anybody signs up for these advertising services they agree to be bound by a set of rules and regulations collectively called the ‘Terms of Service.’ If one party were to break a few of the rules found in the agreement (splogs), and if the other party found out (Google), the agreement would should be terminated.

Here are a few choice rules that publishers who use Google’s Adsense program must adhere to. Site content may not include:

• Excessive profanity
• Violence, racial intolerance, or advocate against any individual, group, or organization
• Hacking/cracking content
• Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia
• Pornography, adult, or mature content
• Gambling or casino-related content
• Excessive advertising
• Any other content that promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others
• Incentives to, clicking on ads or links, performing searches, surfing websites, reading emails, or completing surveys
• Sales or promotion of weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles, alcohol, tobacco or tobacco-related products, prescription drugs, and products that are replicas or imitations of designer goods

My suggestion, write something that completely violates these rules in an overt way. Go crazy, use your imagination. This is your chance to play a very very dirty prank.

Take your new creative writing piece and use it with AntiLeech so that whenever a splog comes to take your content, they take your agreement violating creative writing piece instead. Should Google ever discover that the splog is placing ads next to this disgusting drivel — they’ll cancel (or warn) the offending site.

With the money gone, or atleast the constant threat of your site promoting illegal behaviour, it will require the splogger to be much more careful and/ or drop your site from the list of those he or she steals from. It will require more of their time which costs them money.

Sploggers are lazy, if it takes too much energy to make money this way they’ll stop. If they can’t make money this way they’ll stop. The same principle also applies to splogger hosts (if they use decent law abiding ones that is). For example, in the DreamHost TOS, they explicitly state that customers who deal with child pornography and / or “tools or methods to send unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings (spam)” will break their agreement resulting in a terminated account. Consider the mockup of some fake content (shown at the top of this post) that would get a lot of websites in trouble.

MaxPower thinks it would be more than a little crass to use something as horrible as child pornography to take down a spammer. However, helping out a splog promote spam and spamming methods, firearms, alcohol, gambling, hacking, drugs… — no problem!

Here is the kicker: since this vile content never ever ever appears on your site, you are in the clear. Afterall, the splog came for your content, you gave them some content. Whats it to you if the site owner wasn’t watching what his/ her bot was doing? Is there even any evidence (available publicly) that the content that appeared on another site came from yours? Even if there was… so what?

As a justice seeking AntiLeech wielding blog owner vigilante, all you need do is figure out when a splog as stolen your content, and report them to the right place. You could track splog acceptance of this fake content using a personal googlewhack (like the digital fingerprint plugin for WordPress published by MaxPower). Even if nothing happens, the splog gets useless content that will offend any normal webuser into hitting the back button.

Problems I foresee:

• Feeding the wrong content to a good guy
  • Conceivably, you could use AntiLeech to target the wrong IP / useragent. Only RSS readers would see this so it would never appear on your site in the traditional sense. One way to get around this is to add a statement at the start of the fake text to indicate its intent. This would have to be carefully worded so as not to alert those companies who will be investigating the splog for TOS breaking.
• Some splogs strip out all HTML before reposting
  • Many splogs won’t just copy your post verbatim, they strip out HREF and IMG tags. Your dirty message bomb needs to be explicit in the link (eg. www.websitelink.com) so that the splog takes the spelled out link as text regardless of your markup
• FeedBurner and AntiLeech
  • FeedBurner is a service that takes the feed published at your site, and makes it available at a different address for potential subscribers. At this time, I’m not sure if FeedBurner hurts AntiLeech performance with respect to feeding blogs fake content. More investigation is required.

Subscribe to MaxPower: empowered by monkeys