Reviews Being Stolen???

Has anybody ever heard of ramocafe.com?

I discovered today that the reviews I've done are all somehow on this site called Ramo Cafe. The home page is in arabic, and using google translate it looks like some sort of forum with a lot of miscellaneous junk and no real overall topic as far as I can tell.

You can see that my reviews are all on the site if you do a google search for "Object/Subject Review ramocafe". Here's an example of the CPF version and the Ramo Cafe version of my review of the Balder BD-4:

http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb...w-Balder-BD-4-(XM-L-U2)&p=3783542#post3783542
http://www.ramocafe.com/t387956.html

And it isn't just some sort of automatic link to my review, but it is something that somebody at some point copied from CPF and posted to Ramo Cafe. You can tell because the Ramo Cafe version is half complete; they copied the BD-4 review when I had only posted about half of it to CPF.

And it's not just my reviews, it seems a lot of CPF material is being copied to Ramo Cafe. You can do a google search for "flashlight review ramocafe" and see a ton of stuff from CPF that has been copied to there. For example, I found some of selfbuilt's and HJK's stuff there. I can find no evidence that any credit is being given to original authors, but it's hard to tell because the home page is an arabic, so I can't seem to navigate to any of the CPF material from the Ramo Cafe home page, I can just find it with a google search.

Does anybody have any idea what might be going on here? The idea of this material that we all put significant work into being stolen makes me a little grumpy. Is this some automatic script copying what we post here, or are real people coming to CPF to copy our material?

That sucks. Theres a contact form and email address, although some of the text there is in arabic or something... Still I would let them know youre onto them, and they should pull the plaigarism immediately.

This can be filed into the "unfortunate side of the internet" basket. Not likely you'll get too far with them. Tons of places steal content in hopes it'll generate enough random traffic that adds will pay off.

This type of activity has been discussed before. There's not much that can be done about it, as Greta explained in that thread.

Preventing the theft of copyright material is pretty hopeless at the best of times, and posting anything in an open forum is tantamount to inviting other people to make use of it for their own purposes. Sad, but true.

They hotlinked all your photos, so in this case you might derive some amusement by changing one of your more prominent pics to show an appetising pork recipe, but the fact is that hardly anyone actually reads the stolen content anyway. It's just there for the linkbacks to generate advertising revenue.

DM51 said:

...An appetising pork recipe...

Click to expand...

I'd vote for this character:




Looks like he has horns...

you can buy a domain, some autoblog software, type in some subject matter, and have the bot do the rest
and it can scour the 'net day and night and steal content and populate yer new blog. this happens
constantly, worldwide. probably a million autoblog bots running at any given moment. all they want is
some random click on the new site to generate that .00001 cent

yes get creative with image substitution.
rename your stuff and fix the links.then substitute the hotlinked images ans add some text across them.like this is what happens when you steal.
was very effective with ebay scammers stealing my images/decriptions and hotlinking.the museum quality philco 16 cathedral became some gal "servicing" a horse.took several days for ebay to react.that scam auction got about 50000 hits.
if the subversive tactics were utilised by more folks these junk sites would die.

DM51 said:

This type of activity has been discussed before. There's not much that can be done about it, as Greta explained in that thread.

Preventing the theft of copyright material is pretty hopeless at the best of times, and posting anything in an open forum is tantamount to inviting other people to make use of it for their own purposes. Sad, but true.

They hotlinked all your photos, so in this case you might derive some amusement by changing one of your more prominent pics to show an appetising pork recipe, but the fact is that hardly anyone actually reads the stolen content anyway. It's just there for the linkbacks to generate advertising revenue.

Click to expand...

Just a couple of days ago I had some correspondence with Greta and DM51 about this same topic, only it was about a thread I started that had been jacked by a different Islamist web site. Greta referred me to the same thread that DM51 referenced here in this thread. It's funny actually, since I thought this topic may have come up before I searched for it but I used terms like "stolen" and "theft" but didn't think of "ripped off" so I didn't find it until Greta sent me there.

In my case, the post and image were copied to another vBulletin forum, only a bogus one populated by fake members who have never posted anything. Someone had chosen words (probably randomly, possible through scripting) within my original post that were turned into hyperlinks that once clicked on would take you to a number of layered Arabic language Islamist websites hosted in the United States but directed primarily to citizens of Jordan. The whole thing really puzzled me, even after translating some of it as it didn't make any sense. It was only after taking the time to examine the code on the different sites that it became clear that this site(s) was a small facet of a massive CLICK FRAUD operation that was different than any I've seen before. Basically, an innocent person in Jordan (or anywhere) looking for say, a discussion of Mohammed or Felafel recipes or perhaps a discussion of flashlights gets tricked into clicking on pay-per-click ads that don't look like ads because they are hidden in mundane looking text. Much of this stuff is automated through scripting but some of it is what is known as CLICK FARMING where poor people are paid a tiny wage to sit and click on links all day. The idea is to steal huge swaths of internet content that has already been crawled by search engines and that are likely to garner traffic to the bogus sites along with the legit ones. As time goes by this is becoming an enormous problem for the internet, not only because of the outright copyright and content theft but particularly for huge corporations like Google that rely on pay-per-click revenues for its bottom line. since this type of fraud is jeopardizing the entire business model.

This brings me to the overall topic of hotlinking which is rampant here on CPF and sadly sometimes I've figured out that CPF members are some of the culprits. On many occasions I have found photos I've posted here hotlinked to sites and forums all over the world. Occasionally, when I'm annoyed enough or feeling mischievous I've swapped the hot linked images for something the person stealing the particular image would not be too happy to discover he's posted to another website and in one instance, I swapped the stolen image for an image of a written message calling the idiot out personally about not hot linking photos. DM51 and snakebite mention this tactic but if you self host at your own domain as I do, one has to be careful to not invite retribution.

The problem of image theft and hotlinking is such a problem on CPF that I have become reluctant to post things. One example was a photo of a gigantic carrot I grew in my garden that I posted to a thread here at CPF about hobbies other than collecting that I discovered is now being used to market carrot seeds in Eastern Europe and that had been watermarked with a copyright notice!! Unfortunately, this image was stolen from CPF rather than linked so there is nothing that can be done about it. Another example was a spectacular photo of a house burning down that has been used by commercial web sites all over the world including several insurance agencies and brokerages in the US, a wall board company in Australia and a propaganda site in Albania that claims it is a house that had been burned down by terrorist Gypsies! I have many more such examples.

BTW, if you have photos that you think may have been stolen and used elsewhere on the internet and you want to find them, try using Tin Eye reverse image search or drag your image from your desktop onto the Google image search page. (This works in Firefox but not in Safari....not sure about tother browsers) The Google image search especially may surprise you with what turns up. An innocent (or not so) photo you posted on Facebook may turn up in surprising places you never could have imagined.

I've been on the internet for a very long time, since around the time Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was introduced. When I first got on the internet there was no such thing as SPAM; no such thing as MALWARE; no such thing as SPYWARE; no such thing as WEB BEACONS or tracking cookies and SUPER COOKIES; and there were no commercial web sites to speak of. It was largely a world of graduate students and enthusiasts posting and viewing what interested us and creating what was to come later. So all these years later it is sad to witness the privacy invading, personal tracking, content stealing, propaganda, fraud infested and hacked environment it has become.:sigh:

China government is the real threat. I don't mean mom and pop stuff, or CPF content...I mean 30,000 highly skilled
paid government hackers trying (and sadly sometimes succeeding) to bust into government, banks, defense contractors, NASA...sites
and stealing data which can dictate the fate of nations and defense and outcomes of wars and skirmishes. that is
the stuff you could lose sleep over. they work on 'problems' for years and years. for example: 6 years of diligent phishing to get an
in onto a NASA site, then 3 more years of access but tripping no alarms or warnings until they had hooks into everything...after detection,
the NSA watched them for 8 months and learned what they were up to....

script kiddies blogging stolen content for clicks is childs play.

the above is essentially accurate but intentionally obscure enough to tell a story without telling anything meaningful

China government or other governments as well... stuxnet comes to mind (but that will be better discussed in the underground).

Remember: no one is guilty-free.

127.0.0.1 said:

China government is the real threat. I don't mean mom and pop stuff, or CPF content...I mean 30,000 highly skilled
paid government hackers trying (and sadly sometimes succeeding) to bust into government, banks, defense contractors, NASA...sites
and stealing data which can dictate the fate of nations and defense and outcomes of wars and skirmishes. that is
the stuff you could lose sleep over. they work on 'problems' for years and years. for example: 6 years of diligent phishing to get an
in onto a NASA site, then 3 more years of access but tripping no alarms or warnings until they had hooks into everything...after detection,
the NSA watched them for 8 months and learned what they were up to....

script kiddies blogging stolen content for clicks is childs play.

the above is essentially accurate but intentionally obscure enough to tell a story without telling anything meaningful

Click to expand...

This is a thread about posts and photos being lifted from CPF. Your remarks about China are certainly valid but that is essentially another topic in and of itself.

127.0.0.1 we can do without the kind of condescending/insulting remarks I've noticed you seem to have a propensity to indulge in here on CPF now that you've posted over 300 times in the two months or so since your arrival. If you have nothing to offer but self righteous comments why don't you try somewhere else, OK?

Just found a couple of my hds pictures on a couple of websites. This really is disappointing.

Image watermarks could be used, I guess. I know they get in the way, but at least it makes it a little bit harder for people to steal the images, at least.

I keep a folder on a server where I host all of the images that I have ever posted to threads here on CPF. The following screen shot is a list of external links from my server's stats log within the last 24 hours to images in that folder from other website domains. Most of the links are from web sites and a forum or two in Russia with a few sprinkled in from Ukraine, India and the USA. The Islamist site(s) I mentioned in a previous post to this thread is/are on the list. Looking back through the logs, this list has been expanding exponentially and the only way to fix the problem will be to delete the folder. Interestingly, nothing else on my server has been linked or compromised but the statistics show a concerted effort to try to gain root access to the directory. The problem seems to be entirely related to threads and images posted to CPF.

This problem is far more pervasive than I realized, assuming this small individual sampling is any indication.

bshanahan14rulz said:

Image watermarks could be used, I guess. I know they get in the way, but at least it makes it a little bit harder for people to steal the images, at least.

Click to expand...

Thats a good idea, something i have done in the past. Its a shame that good honest people have to resort to this though.

127.0.0.1 said:

...all they want is some random click on the new site to generate that .00001 cent

Click to expand...

I totally agree with this statement. Unfortunately there is little that can be done if these websites are hosted in other countries.

EZO said:

This problem is far more pervasive than I realized, assuming this small individual sampling is any indication.

Click to expand...

Wow, that list is quite extensive. Are these sites generating alot of bandwidth?

~Deicide~ said:

Wow, that list is quite extensive. Are these sites generating alot of bandwidth?

Click to expand...

I'm still trying to analyze this but for the most part the bandwidth issue doesn't seem to be a really a big problem. (So far) A few hits per link here and there for the time being, but I'm only seeing a very short time window.

BTW, looking at the above list a little closer I see that one of them is a .tv domain. I skipped over it because the term "TV" is so familiar and mundane that it didn't quite register at first but it turns out to be the Country code top level domain for the tiny Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu somewhere out there in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Interesting......

EDIT: Oh, the site hosted in TUVALU is in Russian.

~Deicide~ said:

Thats a good idea, something i have done in the past. Its a shame that good honest people have to resort to this though.

Click to expand...

I've been watermarking all of my images since pretty much the beginning. I didn't do it for my XL100 or XL50 review, and within a couple weeks my images were appearing all over eBay (it was amusing that they also used the photo of my XL50 packaging, which was clearly marked "sales sample"). I sent a couple cease and desist notices, then started putting a translucent watermark down the vertical.


It's not very aesthetically pleasing, but works better than a small logo or URL on the corner, which could easily be removed.

Thanks for the input everyone. While it would be funny to get on and change the images to something offensive to those who stole the reviews, I don't really have anything financially invested in the reviews, so it's not really worth the effort to try to spoil their site. I mainly wanted to report this for the sake of those who are financially invested in CPF, because Ramo Cafe is potentially taking web traffic away from CPF.

EZO (or anyone else), where do you host your images that you can have access to that kind of data? That looks pretty useful to me.

To those who use watermarks, what program do you use to do the watermarking? I have a Macbook, and I haven't been able to find a good free/cheap program that can do watermarking easily.

Hi Bigmac_79,

If you own an internet domain and host a web site somewhere it will live on a server where you will have a directory or series of directories. You can easily create a folder within the directory where you can store anything you want that will not be part of your web site unless you want it to be. So, in my case I simply created a folder within a directory where I have a web site where I put photos I wish to post on CPF and when I want to publish an image I just point the image link button on CPF to a URL for my photo. I like to do this because it gives me a lot of control over the images, it's free and I don't have to agree with the ridiculous Terms of Service agreements that most hosting services like Photobucket make you sign. I self host images I put on eBay this way too.

Every hosting service out there offers free statistics access of some kind. My hosting company offers a choice of several "brands" and each has it's merits and capabilities. There are also many services available on the internet by themselves. You'd be amazed at how much interesting information you can obtain about visitors to your site. I was joking with a friend that I can tell the shoe size of anyone who visits my sites and she almost believed me! Finding out who's linked to your site is trivial but some statistics services give you a more granular level of information regarding what they are actually linking to.

Many people use Photoshop for watermarking but there are dedicated watermarking apps out there that you can find if you do some searching.

BTW, Many people sign up for free services like Photobucket without bothering to actually read the Terms of Service contract that they are agreeing to and are shocked to find out what they've signed up for after the fact. Here's a snippet from Photobucket's terms that may be of interest to anyone putting their personal images on the Bucket, particularly anything that might have commercial value one day.

"You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to copy, distribute, publicly perform (e.g., stream it), publicly display (e.g., post it elsewhere), reproduce and create derivative works from it (meaning things based on it), anywhere, whether in print or any kind of electronic version that exists now or later developed, for any purpose, including a commercial purpose."

I am not sure if this would help or not, but some web hosting sites have a feature that prevents access from ranges of IP adr. If you are so inclined, you can load in the IP adr from locations where the "problems" likely are coming from, and at least reduce the server traffic load. It is a bit brute force, but it has helped reduce junk traffic on my web site.

Of course a pro can get past anything, but it is a start.

It is too bad that the translation site is potentially click fraud. If I spoke only Arabic, it would be nice if a firm offered a translated version of CPF for me to read. Certainly, CPF is a great example of lighting knowledge and friendly social interaction. I can see how reading a web site like CPF could help improve our understanding of each other, and reduce world tension. (other than the desire to own more flashlights)

As far as the NASA breech, I think it is likely that it was at least partially an inside job. That approach is more in-line with the techniques commonly used than a pure outside attack. (my speculation)