Wow, good catch. That's astonishingly bad.

Url changed from http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=18995. Should we ban that site?

My personal thought on that is I would. Especially for repeat offenders. Though I can imagine something like that can quickly become a game of cat and mouse. But what I bet those sorts of sites don't have is the resources to compete against a crowd-sourced effort to keep those sorts of sites off HN. Not that people would be looking for offenders while browsing stories, but it's likely with awareness people would take time to verify unfamiliar sources that are submitted to the site. At least it forces owners of sites like that to scramble if they realize they can no longer get the clicks they used to get from HN. Especially the ones who are just spamming content in order to generate clicks.

It appears there have been a lot of submissions for that site in the past, so if they're a repeat offender it would probably be easy to extract that info.

You guys probably have a treasure trove of data where you could probably extract some of the more obvious offenders pretty easily. Cross referencing submissions by specific individuals for specific domains, etc. Though I imagine there would be plenty of false positives...

Also, just a thought, I would suggest that the warning message to submitter (if they tried to submit new URLs from banned domains) would be that the site has a history of plagiarism. That way they would probably do additional work to find the original (or more original) link than the one on that site. Also that way in case a site owner wanted to object they would know the reasoning behind the ban.

I know HN has been around a long time so I am probably re-hashing some of the things you've already got in place, but figured I'd put some thoughts out there in case you guys didn't already have something in place.

Would you suggest reporting these sorts of things via email in general?

Thanks for the input. Yes, please definitely report anything like this via email. That's the only reason we found out about this—another user wrote and suggested changing the link.

I wasn't 100% sure of the etiquette when something like that comes up. I posted to the thread earlier, but no one definitively told me that's how I should handle it. I will make a note for future reference.

BTW, I've been going through a number of that domain's links here just a little while ago and saw most of the stories from that site are cross-posted on many other domains. It's almost as if there are so many cross-posts on some of those stories Google can't easily point me to a more "definitive" source. Instead there are just pages of links to unrecognizable domains that are all probably doing the same thing.

It's still an issue.

I don't know technically what the etiquette should be for something like this, but I would call this plagiarism.

They copied the original verbatim, then they put a new date on it, and surrounded it with a bunch of ads.

EFF might care less than most other authors about this otherwise-shady behavior. After all the message is still getting out.

I'd be interested to know if HN moderators take note of this kind of behavior and consider blocking domains that have a history of doing this kind of thing.

Even though it's probably not a big deal to EFF, it's almost certainly a big deal to whoever is making money on other peoples' content. Not that I have noticed a problem on HN with this kind of thing before, but it seems it's the sort of thing that if it goes unchecked can potentially degrade quality given that HN would become a target for that sort of thing.

I personally wouldn't mind if a few of those articles didn't show up if the submitter was blocked, since it would only mean the submitter wasn't interested in doing the work to find the original source.

It appears that the EFF licenses its content under the Creative Commons Attribution License[0][1], which would make it acceptable to redistribute original content which is not already under a more restrictive license, if attribution is given, which the original site does not appear to have done. They also altered the content to remove the final paragraph, which would require attribution as well.

The EFF would be undermining their own credibility (not to mention that of free/open source licenses) if they were aware of this and choose to ignore it. I'd bet no one bothered reporting it, though.

[0]https://www.eff.org/copyright

[1]https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

The news is that they have decoded the information in the dots.

That's HelpNet four you. It's not the first time they did this.