Someone Is Stealing My Blog Content Again

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Not even a month has passed and I’ve found another thief stealing my blog content. This thief is smarter in hiding his/her identity but I’ve a hunch he/she is from China. The article ripped off is my iPhone in Malaysia upgrade from 1.1.4 to 2.0.1.

It seems there is an increase of spam blogs all of a sudden. It’s like some brilliant mentor or Internet marketer is now telling everyone you can make money by copying other people’s content. Saying it’s not wrong to use other people’s content and along the way, I think their participants took using other people’s content literally. Sigh.

Despite having my hotlink protection via my hosting panel enabled, I’ve also installed a WordPress hotlink protection plugin. Upon my own investigation, this new thief is stealing my images via my feeds. It looks like this:

http://www.your-site.com/blog/index.php?feedimage=wp-content/uploads/2008/08/img-003-160×120.jpg

Now, this worries me. Is our feed or WordPress insecure?

P.S: I’m using Feedburner (acquired by Google).

11 thoughts on “Someone Is Stealing My Blog Content Again”

  7. rocsta:
    I don’t even have to use Google Analytics. Even with WordPress Stats I can see incoming links therefore I can see that links within my post are coming back to me from another source.

    fath:
    Yeah, I know. I was thinking of giving the person a ‘surpise’ in a post he plans to next steal. Oh, I’ve also found out he even copied one of my Someone is Stealing my Blog Content post. LOL! :P

  8. maybe to much melamine in the bloggers diet? haahaha i know, low blow.

    anyway.

    danny, you put la 1million plugins and all. if somebody nak buat jahat, they’ll always find a way lah.

    plus thats the internet for you buddy. Who the hell can regulate the internet much right?

    not only copy blog content, copy webdesign pun ada.

  9. Yeah, I know the belief if they really are out to get you, they will. Then again, you can look at stealing content via an RSS feed as a security issue – maybe.

  10. Sorry to hear about you falling victim to plagiarism! But you’re not the only one out here… there are so many fake blogs around, regardless of whether they are operated by a real person or a malicious bot, that go around replicating contents on the Internet. Their only aim is one – to divert traffic from the original content to their advertisement-laden sites so that they can reap monetary benefits without actually doing much brainwork.

    The good thing is that, although you can’t really stop content replication, you can stop image hotlinking. You don’t actually need a plugin to do that – if your site is running on cPanel, there’s a hotlinkng protection function that will prevent external access to your images (unless people explicitly type the image url in the browser address bar) through other websites. Of course, you can also do it manually by editing the .htaccess file. But remember to keep a backup copy of that file just in case anything goes wrong ;)

    My tutorials and posts (even photos!) were copied by a kid (yes, he’s only 12 back then) and he conveniently forget to credit me for my work. He even got the guts to photoshop out my photo captions and claim my works as his own. When I emailed him a request for him to remove the contents, he retaliated and even posted fake comments (under the names of my other blog friends) to frustrate me. Obviously I didn’t fall for it and he got himself in a hotter soup for imposing as others…

    Take care!

  11. Thanks for the advice there, teddy. For the htaccess method, it’s been enabled however the images are still being leaked out due to the method it’s being taken. Because it’s not directly linking from within the folder of the server but the feed, I’ve a feeling this is a loophole in RSS feeds.

    Well, maybe. But end of the day, I’m just ignoring the whole thing and putting an ‘+’ ego point for myself for being ‘famous’ I suppose. LOL!

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