The camelot, the straw man and the faceless community.

[kgun]

S(he) and they are everywhere. They are part of a faceless community and they change identity, Ip, Email adresse, Geo location, nick name, picture etc. They may pretend to come from / represent large companies.

They can dominate the search engines in houers. Their sites are on the net in 10 minutes, they have databases of emails, etc. They can sell a good you never see and they can pretend to be experts. Some are experts. They are experts at argumenting and they defend each othere. One sign is that they defend persons and not arguments. Professional IT persones seldom do that. They are the worst people you can argument with. You think they may hate you, but in the end the will tech you sound techniques. The never consiously defend an argument they know is wrong.

If one member is attacked, the other members are there in minutes to defend them and not the argument. They can dominate even an advanced SE like Google in a few days. They steal your identity, your site information, your KW's, your name, your title tags, every little part of your eProperty. They hijack affiliate links and the most advanced may be able to steal your Google AdSense identity (for weeks, days and hours) by advanced mirroring or redirections. You will never discover their attack. And if you discover it, (s)he has disappeared long before you start to defend yourself, changed identity or used middle / straw men.

They may pretend to be your friend, but they only use your friendship to get information and seldom give anything back. I do not talk about persons surfing the web for information and using it to the best for themself, their company and product. Many buisy persons, hard working real persons do not have time to register and argument.

They never thank you for a good advice. It is nearyly impossible to fight them unless you have advanced filters, are part of a network that know how to protect yourself, hopefully a larger network than theirs. An effective method is to identify the IP adresses where the abuse come from, distribute these lists in your network, but that is not enough. In a few minutes they are on another IP in another part of the world, with a fake name, email, picture and dynamic or worse random IP.

Who can your rely on in the faceless network (world)? The person you thought was your friend, is there only to use you. In a few minutes or weeks (s)he hits you in your nexk with a knife. You will soon identify who helps you and who does not. You will soon identify who propose sound practice and not. Don't misunderstand sound and real argumentation, disagreement and competition is good. That results in better services and products.

Worst of all large companies are involved in not respecting robots.txt, copyright, browser hijcaking in short (digital)industry "theft". And they have resources, lawyers and they win. Microsoft wins against spammers, but they loose against a customs union that has an concious or unconsious intention / agenda of building a superstate. That may be a good or bad in the worst case, an evil state. Don't misunderstand. Nobody know the future, but we know history.

Microsoft wins against Apple and Lotus and small spammers, but for the future IMO, Bill as that customs union, should also ride cleaner. SE Bots. They may be dangerous. Do you always know where they come from? Can a bot from inner nowhereland be a bot from market leader, no I don't mean ...

Bjarne Strostrup (I love Danish people) has given the world an excellent program, by some called the next generation assembler, C++. He is real and he tells the truth. In his books he writes "This I stole from Simula" and this "I stole from Simula". Now Firefox "steals" from Opera and IE "steals" from FireFox. Persons on various networks and communities that pretend to be web designers, SEO and generally IT experst reccomend these "bad copies" that are less secure, accessible and user friendly. I would presonally never hire their service.

As a last reminder, if you are in the business of "copying" and I am in that business myself, every of us are, there are some accepted methods. Do it like Bjarne Strostrup and cite the source. Link to the page where you got the story. Tell friends about the great software you copied parts of and made unreckognizeable. And remember, if you ever copy software do it secure:

"But after a while, most programmers realize that this means that a program is equipped with a safety net: many errors that programmers make when they construct programs are caught by this net before they lead to unpleasant effects. An example: A very expensive American space rocket crashed on its way to Venus a few years ago, because of an extremely trivial error in a FORTRAN program. A comma had be written as a point, and, as a consequence of that, the start of a special kind of repeat imperative was mistakenly read as an assignment imperative assigning a value to an undeclared variable. Had it been required to declare every variable in FORTRAN programs, the compiler would have discovered that the variable was undeclared and the error would have been caught much earlier than in the Atlantic Ocean."
Professor Bjørn Kirkerud (1989): "Object Oriented Programming With Simula". Addison Wesley Publishing Company ISBN 0 201 17574 6. Page 31-32.


So if you "steal" and "copy" make it better than the source. That is how the world evolve. There are many "copies" of the wheel. The first was not the best.

So you did know the difference between

= and == in C inspired languages like PHP?

This is only the top of the ice mountain. Written in a hurry. Any other stories from paranoid persons like me?

[dburdon]

Kjell,

very Scandinavian. Got lost on the computer programming bit. Although I do recall using a Fortran expert back in the late 1970s early 80s.

If you lived in the UK, you'd realise they (our lousy Government) really are out to get you.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

[kgun]

David,

Thank you for your fast comment. There are many reasons I wrote this post. Here is one:

Originally Posted by kgun

Answer awaited. Spammers will always be able to mainpulate a SE index. That is why content delivered via portals or linkcollections like your own may be more important in the future.

Search Engine Optimization by using robots.txt for your blog, wordpress, or phpbb

# Disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.wmv$
Disallow: /*.tar$
Disallow: /*.tgz$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$

Ok, I agree with you in that we shall make the life as difficult as possible for spammers.

The solution to this problem should be to differentiate bots in a least three categories that are handled differently in robots.txt:

1. Bad Bots should be blocked via https, code or in .htaccess if you are on an Apache server or by writing a spider trap.
2. Good SE Bots should not be allowed to index content as blocked above. Why should they be allowed to index my style sheets and other code if I want to block them? This is the easiest way to disallow them.
3. Clearly identifiable Spam Detecting Bots, that should be allowed to look at but not index code and raise red flags if sign of spam / scam is found. Misuse should be penalized very hard.

Will the internet go more and more in a direction of authentication like .NET or OpenID?

Today it is very difficult for the average Joe to protect his business if somebody has bad intentions or does not like his face.

Should the report of abuse to serious SE be easier if serious scam / spam is identified. Should yellow and red cards be given like in soccer? That is, should a spammer get a warning or be deleted from the index for a time, in serious cases for ever? Who should define spam, private companies or government agencies?

[aaron2005]

You are not paranoid at all kgun. It must stink if you are a developer and work hard on something that is then snatched away by someone with a big budget.

If I was a developer I would learn the art of stealth and not launch a new idea until it had it's roots fully branded. Then you have something to use to prove that your idea was stolen. Then you also might even have legal action on your side or at the very least you could throw a serious negative press beatdown on those who steal.

Stealing content is also an issue, ever blog about something and notice that a few minutes later a more known blogger picks up on what you wrote via RSS feed reader to take credit for your idea?

Good post!

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

Search Engine Optimization by using robots.txt for your blog, wordpress, or phpbb

Thanks for the link Kjell.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by kgun

They can dominate the search engines in houers. Their sites are on the net in 10 minutes, they have databases of emails, etc. They can sell a good you never see and they can pretend to be experts. Some are experts. They are experts at argumenting and they defend each othere. One sign is that they defend persons and not arguments. Professional IT persones seldom do that. They are the worst people you can argument with. You think they may hate you, but in the end the will tech you sound techniques. The never consiously defend an argument they know is wrong.

By reareading my post, I see that this section is a little unclear.

By this

Professional IT persons seldom do that. They are the worst people you can argument with. You think they may hate you, but in the end they will teach you sound techniques. They never conciously defend an argument they know is wrong.

i mean that professional IT-persons is impossible to argument with. I remember my experience working on an IBM Mainframe in the Central Bank of Norway, with IT-persons from MIT and our own IT-department. I was sure that the computer was wrong. Very often they responded when I presented the problem to them.

It is an user error.

In 99 % of the cases they were correct.

And a professional IT-person is never a camelot. (S)he takes the ball and not the man. A weather **** is excellent to show the direction of the wind, but useless as a compass.

That means that communities where it is so important to build relations and networks, is not ideal for discussing IT-problems.

"They never conciously defend an argument they know is wrong".

A space ship, with or without people, worth billions of USD, can end up in the ocean if you defend / attack people instead of arguments.

I am not an expert.

[kgun]

I top this thread, since it may be relevant.