Wednesday 2 March 2022

Welcome to The BBHQ Midweek News Round-Up ~ Let's Celebrate Dr Seuss Day, plus Dr Seuss Wordsearch, The BionicBasil Blog is Being Content Scraped Again & Maybe Yours is Too AND Amber is The Cat In A Hat

Mid-Week News Round Up with The B Team ©BionicBasil® Dr Seuss

Epic Wednesday Greetings Furiends

Welcome to the BBHQ midweek news round-up!

Welcome to March, and how's your week going? We're delighted that we're moving into Spring, not before time as this winter seems to have dragged on somewhat. And we're also looking forward to lighter nights when the clocks go forward on the 27th of the month

First up in the news this week

 It's Dr Seuss Day WOOO HOOOO!

I am here looking epically epic in my special hat!

Basil The Cat In The Hat ©BionicBasil® The Midweek News Round-up
The Cat in The Hat is epically epic! MOL

And here's a fabulous Dr Seuss themed wordsearch.

Just right-click the image to save and/or print.

Next up in the news this week 

Bad news, the blog is being content scraped again by some worthless sack of used cat litter. The website is very bizarre, it appears to be in the Middle East, although there are no contact details on the website, and when mew click on anything it moves to another web address. They have really lots of really old content from BBHQ, as well as Amber's latest blog post last Friday.

Please note: the listed web addresses in red are NOT links and the blue text are active no-follow links to Whois, the look up directory.

The actual entry page to find anything being scraped is this one:

https://dubaiburjkhalifas.com/bionic-basil-home-of-basil-and-the-b-team-meowy-catmas/

and here is the whois details for the above link:


Although everything is redacted on this page.


They've got loads and loads of clickable BBHQ pictures/links which then opens up more stolen content. The accompanying text is random and garbled, some text is from the posts and some is not. And also some of the links attached to the pictures are forwarded to unsafe pages or p.o.r.n.

Dash Kitten. Summer at Sparkle Cat. Eastside Cats. Wonderpurr. Erin the Cat Princess. The Swiss Cats and a video from Peaches and Paprika are just a few of the other cat bloggers we found. 

We didn't have time to search anymore, but it would appear they are serial offenders and have no shame.

If mew search for your blog on the https://dubaiburjkhalifas.com site, other URLs appear such as: 

http://web1.dubainine.com/  -  here are the Whois details.

http://web4.free758.info/  - here are the Whois details.

http://ww1.ciampeathehomedesignings.com/ - here are the Whois details.

And these aforementioned sites all have BionicBasil content on, which is spawned from the first website, this one:  https://dubaiburjkhalifas.com

Also, there are no available URLs for each individual pirated post, they all look like the above addresses in red. So it is impossible to copy a direct link to the pirated content. Our point is this, these scrapers are very clever and know that to successfully serve a DMCA mew need the direct URLs of each post on the offending website

We also found that when we clicked the back button on our browser from the websites in red it took us to a German website that has no content, though it did have a cat on it - see below. As we clicked around this site, we eventually found a contact page. 



Whether this German site is part of whatever is going on, we can't be sure, as they aren't actually showing any of our content, but the fact that it is linked to the main content is very iffy.

It seems that to get anything removed will be a job in itself as there are so many different websites involved, and the links from the main entry website are then just funnelled out to a myriad of other sites, and as we said hitting the back button sends mew to Germany - tres bizarre indeed!

We are unsure if they are content scraping through RSS feeds or just scraping the actual blog manually or with an automated bot. Our RSS feeds are short with no photo's so we are surmising that they are scraping directly from the blog.

We have just been checking on a few forums and the general consensus is this:

A DMCA Takedown Notice emailed to the website host, should be enough to have the websites removed. Apparently, the host has to remove the blog or site. Whether this is true or not in 2022, we don't know.

We just checked and Cloudflare is the hosting site of: https://dubaiburjkhalifas.com  and after a little bit of recon, it would appear that they don't give a fluff about copyright theft and DMCAs from what we've just read on their forum. 

It cost us quite a bit of money to get the last content scrapers to remove our stuff from the ITN fake news site, as we had to get a lawyer involved as endless DMCA's emails to both the website owners and Hostgator did nothing; how is this fair, and where can we recoup that loss from?

So there mew have it, this week's mood spoiler with little or no resolution for the affected parties, and the thieves just keep on stealing.

Anyhoo, if mew're one of the unfortunate victims and do any research and come up with anything extra to this, do let us know. 


And finally this week

Let's finish this week with something truly, astoundingly wonderful...

Amber is The Cat In A Hat!

The BBHQ Midweek News Round-Up ©BionicBasil® Amber is The Cat In A Hat

This is a picture of Amber from 2008 wearing a chullo, and doesn't she look gorgeous?


The P.A. will have more ghost stories for mew next week, we just ran out of time yesterday with all this extra research on the content scrapers. 

That's us done for today, Amber will be back on Friday with another fab book just for mew, and if mew missed Monday's post click here to catch up on a BBHQ True Story, and if mew missed the epically epic final episode of Fast, Furry & Dangerous, click here.

Epic purrs

Wing Commander Basil & The B Team 













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Graphics created with paid licence www.canva.com 
Wordsearch created with paid licence from Crossword Compiler

13 comments:

  1. Happy Dr. Seuss Day, sweet friends! Basil, you looks so good in your hat. And speaking of cats in hats ... AMBER, mew are rocking that hat!

    Sorry to hear those jerks are stealing your content. So not cool!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy Dr Seuss Day!

    Yikes, that content scraping/stealing is horrific. I wonder if they use the stuff they glean/steal to send all that spam to our blogs now and then. A lot of them have strange script for their languages: arabic, philippino, etc.

    Sorry that happens to you...again, only this seems worse.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am sorry you are having trouble with content theft again. I don't suppose it is related but the last two or three days I have had a large amount of spam comments for mostly old posts. Yesterday alone I had about thirty. Blogger caught all of them though so they never got as far as being published.
    Those are lovely photos of Basil and Amber in their hats.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Good grief!
    Thank you very much for the information.
    I've got some work to do.
    Terrific Dr. Suess celebration at BBHQ!

    ReplyDelete
  5. ☆¸.•°*”˜˜”*°•.¸☆ ★ ☆¸.•°*”˜˜”*°•.¸☆
    ╔╗╔╦══╦═╦═╦╗╔╗ ★ ★ ★
    ║╚╝║══║═║═║╚╝║ ☆¸.•°*”˜˜”*°•.¸☆
    ║╔╗║╔╗║╔╣╔╩╗╔╝ ★ DR. SEUSS DAY! ☆
    ╚╝╚╩╝╚╩╝╚╝═╚╝ ♥¥☆★☆★☆¥♥ ★☆ ♥♥♥

    ReplyDelete
  6. basil N amber ewe both bee epic lee awesum lee kewl in yur hatz !!!! N thanx two de PA for de puzzle; we downloaded it just now ~~~~☺☺♥♥

    we iz sorree yur blog iz hacked; & we troo lee hope de PA can find a way ta get
    thiz bullz $hi!z stopped for good ......may they bee curzed......both wayz ~~~

    ReplyDelete
  7. Happy Dr. Seuss Day! I have missed many of your posts due to prolonged illness which is far from over, sorry. Just wanted to say that content theft is horrible. I've had lots of that and the worst is still ongoing. Another site took my pictures and a post and combined them with their unsuitable pictures. They were "thanking" me to make it look like I gave permission, I did NOT. The hosting company took their site down for violations of terms of service. They blame me and now repost my new posts on their slimey fb and Twitter sites. Though I haven't been able to post on my site lately and I don't know if I'll be able to again. Just wanted you to know these problems with Internet thieves are really widespread.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Happy Seussing Day gang! Oh Amber, you look so cute in your hat. Sorry they are stealing stuff again. You need to look into hiring a hacker to take those sites down, fight fire with fire, plus it's probably cheaper.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I LOVE the shot of Amber in the hat, so sweet. Thank you for the search a word. I am sorry your content was stolen. XO

    ReplyDelete
  10. Amber looks gorgeous in her hat. Happy Seuss day. Sorry all the bother you've had with your site and stolen content hope they catch them all.x😻💖🐾🐾

    ReplyDelete
  11. The wurld is full of inept hoomons who have to steal from us cweative kittehs. So sad. We have drafted the posts who get the most spam with hopes of getting them to move on. Content scraping on cat blogs is the lowest of the low. Tight hugs, Dori and Kim

    ReplyDelete
  12. Oh, I love you as the Cat in the Hat for Dr. Seuss Day! <3 Epic pic!

    ReplyDelete

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