Plagiarized news sites are using Cyrillic characters to avoid detection • Hacker News Board

Re: Plagiarized news sites are using Cyrillic characters to avoid detection

#31

Post by dmix » Fri, Mar 09, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

mfoy_ wrote: post #5

>The site is part of a growing list of fake Native American pages run out of places like Macedonia, Kosovo or Vietnam. So the headline is a little misleading... It's just that there are a growing number of websites that simply plagiarize content to get views / ad revenue. Because their titles are obfuscated to prevent detection of the plagiarism, they have to target specific niche groups to drive views. So it's not s…

This isn't even fake news. It's just blogspam for advertising dollars. Nothing fake about it... the articles they copy are real content.

This is just jumping on trendy words like Russians/bots/fake news for click bait.

Re: Plagiarized news sites are using Cyrillic characters to avoid detection

#32

Post by dmix » Fri, Mar 09, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

goptimize wrote: post #29

Maarten Schenk (resident expert on fake news) create click-bait titles

It's not even fake news and even plagiarism is a weak description. It's blogspam / content farming for cheap advertising dollars by eastern europeans. This has been going on for ages, much like SEO gaming, it's just using another hacky trick, and using Cyrillic characters is hardly new trick either.

Re: Plagiarized news sites are using Cyrillic characters to avoid detection

#33

Post by smsm42 » Sun, Mar 11, 2018, 7:35 AM UTC

This is an old trick, successfully used for a while in domain names (does gооglе.com look suspicious to you? what if it had a valid SSL certificate?) but hopefully all browsers and registrars have smarted up by now.

Another version of this trick has been popular in Russia with corrupt government workers: by law, a lot of government purchase/service contracts should be subject to public calls for bids, usually placed in a website which you can search. However, if you write what you need replacing some of Cyrillic characters with Latin ones, a honest supplier that is looking for a government contract will never find your entry. However a corrupt one that you have arranged with beforehand would, and will be the sole bidder on this contract, with a price that you have arranged before (which of course includes a juicy cut for the corrupt government official) and nobody is the wiser, all requirements of the law are fulfilled, who could be blamed that there's only one bidder?