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