[harishankar]

Originally Posted by techieMoe

Well, I got a heads up this morning that some kid in India is ripping off my rant on Linux XP 2008. He's a Blogger user, and Blogger makes it very clear they can't do a thing about copyright infringement, but he does use Google AdSense, so I'm using their DMCA takedown process to get it removed.

Unfortunately it means I have to wait until I get to work on Tuesday so I can fax it to them. Lovely.

If you report to google directly they do respond. I once had an article of mine stolen and then took down that blog on my providing the information and the links.

Regards and best of luck.

[elija]

Such is the price of fame and good content. I wish you luck in getting it taken down.

Honestly, I don't think Google gives a rats ass. Search for any specific error message and you will find hundreds of site with the same content - I mean exactly the same. It has been posted somewhere and then apparently scraped.

Rationally I know that I can't blame Google for that; for the most part they don't have any control over the content they index. However, it is kind of difficult to not associate Google with it when the first three pages of results all point to the same scraped content! Which usually is no bloody use in solving the problem.

Sorry that turned in to a bit of a rant but I'm still peeved at falling foul of that again yesterday!

[carlosponti]

linky?

[techieMoe]

Thanks for the heads up on CopyScape. Apparently my Linux XP rant is quite popular, particularly on Warez sites for some reason. I know there's no hope of me getting *those* taken down, but some kid on Blogger should be easy enough. I have my letter ready, but I'll have to fax it somewhere other than work. The number is long distance.

The only other entries on CopyScape are legitimate citations and criticisms on forums (mostly Slackware stuff) so I'm not too worried. I'm just a little annoyed that someone would blatantly claim my work as their own, and on a crappy ad-grab blog at that.

[smolloy]

For shits'n'giggles, I googled for the following string (which I ripped straight from your linux XP rant),

"I should note that at the time I wrote this the English-default version of Linux XP 2008 was not available"

It seems that there are a lot of copycats out there. A couple of blogspot bloggers, plus a load of people who seem to have cut and paste the entire rant into forum posts, presumably so they can start a thread discussing what you said -- or, in some cases, to claim the rant as their own.

I know I'd much rather have them post a link to my adwords sponsored site, rather than cutting and pasting the whole thing.....

[smolloy]

Very interesting rant on the latest Sabayon. I was a pretty big fan of that distro a year or two ago, but it started getting a little buggy and slow so I abandoned it (I'm pretty fickle when it comes to distros). It sounds like it's improved quite a bit.

Just before I left there was a lot of chatter on their forums about the new package management system -- equo (sp?) -- and it's nice to see that it's part of their main system now. Although still a little buggy by the sounds of it....

[techieMoe]

Phew. I just got done playing around with Mandriva 2009 on the laptop. One word: ouch. It's a buggy mess. I'm not going to publish the rant until I've had time to go home and download the full DVD instead. I also don't know how much of the trouble I'm having is due to Mandriva and how much is due to the still ultra-buggy KDE 4.1.

[techieMoe]

Couple of changes today. The redirect is gone, new rant, and a new comic I did for my wife's birthday. Our network here at work has weird caching behavior, so I'm getting a 404 when I try to access it here. Let me know if you all have any issues connecting.

TechieMoe.com: Always Honest, Sometimes Funny

[elija]

Love the cartoon - haven't we all been there

[techieMoe]

I added a new section today for Home Theater Rants, and moved my HDTV and HD-DVD articles there. I also posted a new article based on my recent TV purchase.