Good news though, I found  some stolen content today and it seems the times have finally changed with Google finally allowing web submitted content take down requests. This move has been a long time overdue in my opinion as a majority of these stolen content sites are making their money through Google’s adsense program. With the old fax and email system it was normally easier just to firewall off the network the offending site was hosted on to stop them scraping your content and move on with life.

Here are some tips on what to do if you suspect someone is stealing your content for their own gains without any attribution:

Identify possible stolen content

A lot of the time you can identify potential content theft from your webstats, if you see an image that is getting called a lot more than the post it appears in chances are its being hotlinked to from elsewhere, looking at the referring URL’s is also a good way to spot possible thieves. Enter your web site URL at Copy Scape and see if it can identify any duplicate content for you.

Get the content taken down

Lookup the IP address of the site using the nslookup command on the offending site e.g

nslookup offendingsite.com

This should return something similar to:

Server:        61.88.88.88
Address:    61.88.88.88#53

Now perform a whois on the IP address returned to find out what network the sites is hosted on. This can be done either on the Linux command line using the whois tool or by using a web based tool. This will give you some information on the network similar to:

#
# Query terms are ambiguous.  The query is assumed to be:
#     “n 74.82.173.217″
#
# Use “?” to get help.
#

#
# The following results may also be obtained via:
# http://whois.arin.net/rest/nets;q=74.82.173.217?showDetails=true&showARIN=true
#

American Registry for Internet Numbers NET74 (NET-74-0-0-0-0) 74.0.0.0 – 74.255.255.255
Take 2 Hosting, Inc. T2H-NET4-2 (NET-74-82-160-0-1) 74.82.160.0 – 74.82.191.255

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services are subject to the Terms of Use
# available at: https://www.arin.net/whois_tou.html
#
Here we can see Take 2 Hosting is responsible for this IP range, so you can then Google the company name find out how to contact them and report the offending content. If your lucky sometimes the companies whois record will even include an email address for reporting abuse originating from their network making this step easier. You can also do a whois on the domain of the site itself to find the registration details, 9 / 10 times though those is the content theft line of work will use a domain registrar with a private whois service that obscures the registrant’s contact details.

Report infringement to Google

Reporting the offending content to Google is a crucial  step, first because they can remove their site from the search listings to limit the sites traffic and as most content thieves make their money from adsense they can ban their adsense account. To report offending content head to this form and request it removal.

Source code

<script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="html5_placeholders.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script>
  $(function(){
    $(':input[placeholder]').placeholder();
  });
</script>

You should now be able to add placeholder attributes to the text form elements throughout your site and have them be backward compatible with incompatible browsers eg

Source code

<input type="text" name="user_name" placeholder="enter username">

Steps to revert your Google Results

Download and install the Grease Monkey addon for Firefox here.

After Firefox restarts, go Tools -> Greasemonkey -> enabled, if you go back again you should see this option now has a tick next to it indicating the plugin is active.

Go to the userscripts site and click on the install button for the “Google Classic” script. this will display a Firefox prompt click the “Install” button here.

Now visit Google.com and your results pages should look like the familiar interface you are used to.

This will apply to all flash games, downloadable games and sites that sell games that do not meet Australia’s limited MA 15+ classification.

Shameful! Read the full story here.

Suprisingly just before the auction was stopped the asking price was a tad over $1000, very over priced for a useless ballon of hot air i am sure many fellow Australians would agree! But never the less some of the enquiries from prospective buyers on the auction were very amusing:

Q: If I dress him in Latex and spank him, will this result in his being Refused Classification? 02-Apr-09
A: No my fellow Australian, Nothing will be censored. K Rudd.

Q: Can I pick him up and save postage? What is the quality? I don’t want to buy him and then 02-Apr-09
have him fail continuously days later.
A: Greetings Fellow Australian, Pickup is not an option on this sale. Regards K Rudd.

For those that missed the fun made at the expense of our beloved minister can find the auction here in pdf format as the auction looked at around 10am (sorry about the pdf but was at work).

To find that perfect domain name in advance it may be an idea to take advantage of this service provided by Network Solutions just add the keywords you want included in your search and submit the form to get and RSS feed of expiring domain names that match your keywords.

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said the leak and publication of the ACMA blacklist would be “grossly irresponsible” and undermine efforts to improve cyber safety.

He said ACMA was investigating the matter and considering a range of possible actions including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Australians involved in making the content available would be at “serious risk of criminal prosecution”.

But now later in the day it seems Mr Conroys office is telling the world it wasn’t their blacklist after all, as the published list has way too many URL’s, and they are super responsible and they would never just leave the list laying around to be leaked.

But then again Mr Conroy and his “Ministry of truth”, have been found acting in an underhanded manner before so how much of their story is truth could be anyones guess.

Read More:

Electronic Frontiers Australia

No Clean Feed

No Clean Feed – Twitter

EFA Twitter Feed

YAML

Sounds pretty boring but this is not the YAML which normally comes to mind. YAML in the case stands for Yet Another Multicolumn Layout, simply use the web based interface to design your layout and it will generate the code and CSS for you!

IconPedia

IconPedia is a nice one stop shop for free idividual icons and icon packs in PNG format.

Favicon Maker

This neat utility will create your site a favicon for your site from an uploded image, or you can create one from scratch using their web based editor.

WebScript Lab

A web based utility that allows you to generate attractive animated AJAX gif loading images. This site is also home to a few other design scripts including a favicon generator and a web 2.0 domain name generator.

FormStyle Generator

This handy online tool helps you to quickly design CSS style HTML forms that are easy on the eye.

Reflection Maker

Images with reflections are all the rage in the web 2.0 world, and this site allows you to easily add a reflection to your images so you won’t feel left out

Devel Module

Download the Devel module for your version of Drupal, uncompress and upload to the modules directory of your site. Enable the Devel module in your sites administration section and on the modules configuration page activate the options “collect query info” and “display query log”. You may also want to turn on the “page generation timer” and the “display memory usage” option.

After activating the query log you will see all of the SQL queries that where executed in order to generate the page down the very bottom. Using this list you may like to disable any modules which are ineffiecient, but going through what the queries relate to.

The page generation timer is handy when making changes to benchmark what effect they are having on the speed of your site.

Block Cache Module

Another module you may want to look at to improve your site performance is Block Cache this module as the name suggests caches the blocks on a page, this module has been included in the Drupal Core as of version 6 but is available as a seperate download for 5.x versions of Drupal. In my case installing and enabling this module sliced around 100ms on average off my page generation time.

Boost

This module will cache your pages as static html files enabling huge performance increases for sites with large amounts of anonymous traffic. Each time the Drupal Cron file is executed the cached pages are discarded and recreated when the next visitor requests a page.

MySQL Query Cache Optimisation

MySQL query cache stores the results of a SQL query in memory, aftwerward if the results of a cached query is needed MySQL simply serves the result directly from memory without executing the query again. Fine tuning the query cache will have a massive effect on the speed of your site unfortunately this option is only available to those that have complete control of their server environment i.e not a shared hosting environment.

There are two ways you can go about tweaking the MySQL query cache, if you have SSH access to you server you can simply login via a terminal and edit the values for the query_cache_limit & query_cache_size options in the my.cnf e.g

pico /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Be sure to restart MySQL after making any changes to the configuration file.

The second way to tweak these values if you don’t have shell access but have local GUI access (Windows etc) on the server you can use the “MySQL Administrator” program to change the values for your query cache. If you don’t already have this program you can download it free of charge from the MySQL website.

Using the program to connect to the MySQL service, click on the “Startup Variables” option in the left hand column, then select the performance tab at the top of the screen. Then select the Cache Size check box to enable the setting, and enter your new value, then apply the changes and restart the MySQL service.
You may have to play around a bit with the query cache values to find something that works for you, as the cache size is going to be limited by how much memory you server has available to store query results.

Hopefully after install the modules to cache and playing around with the query cache for MySQL you will see some dramatic improvements in the speed of your Drupal site…. Good Luck !!!

So lets look at what we do know so far about this filter:

• The Government like everything else tells us its important to “protect the children” and stop the flow of kiddie porn. Tim Marshall, the media contact for Senator Conroy stated in an interview on the topic that is “reasonably emotive issue, and you know there’s a few lobby groups in the sector who are pretty keen to put there extreme view out there without perhaps having too much interest in the facts.”
• It will cost lots, how much? Who knows everytime someone quotes a price it is different, rest assured though it will be a fair bit over 100 million.
• The Trials in Tasmania shown accuracy is a hard nut to crack with all filters tested allowing between 2 – 13% of material through that should have been blocked whilst wrongly stopping access to 1.3 – 7.8% of sites tested.
• It will slow down access to the Internet. In their Tasmanian trials only one of the filters had an acceptable level of performance loss (2%) as opposed to between a 21 and 86% slow down from the other filters. Tests showed the most accurate filters to cause the biggest drops in performance.
• The filter will most likely be easy to bypass, making it useless for those that are determined to get unfiltered Internet.
• The Government already spent 89 million providing free Internet filtering software for anyone worried about what content is available on computers in their household. Why should the rest of the country suffer because parents can not keep an eye on their children whilst using the Internet? Why is the “clean feed” and opt out system and not an opt in system after all children make up only 1/5 of the population.
• The Government is remaining very tight lipped about what this other “inappropriate” content is they will be blocking, so we can assume it consists of anything they don’t like with minimal processes in place to appeal.

Australia is already laughed at due to the Government’s refusal to create a new rating for video games that are deemed to be above the MA15+ rating, do you really trust that they can do a better job with the Internet?

Links

Won’t someone think of the adults?

No Clean Feed

FaceBook Group – No To Australian Internet Censorship

FaceBook Group – Australian ISP Filtering Plan Is Stupid

FaceBook Group – Australians Against The National Filter Plan

Wikipedia – Internet Censorship In Australia

Netalert – Be Alarmed, Not Alert

Electronic Frontiers Australia

TIG Petition – Stop Internet Censorship In Oz

Somebody Think Of The Children

BroadBanned Revolution

Libertus – About Censorship & Freedom Of Speech

Videos

Aust Government To Save Children By Destroying The Internet

How To Fight Internet Cenorship In Australia