Toms View of the World

Well, over the weekend, I took the plunge and signed-up for a membership at the local council run fitness centres.

This is not my first gym membership by a long way, but at the moment it’s a very good deal - £28 per month gets me access to use any of the Cardiff Council Leisure centers, including the Gym and Pool at every site, but also other facilities too - now so far, I’ve only tried the 2 facilities nearest to home and work, but I already have a preference - and for the money, the gyms are fairly well equipped - some of the equipment isn’t the newest, but it seems well maintained.

Now all I have to do to get my money’s worth is get down there 2 or 3 times every week. Motivation is gonna be the hard part.

It would seem the debate about “aboutus” is not going away yet - with AboutUs.org now having a “concerns” page (surely the fact that this is necessary at all should be a big red warning flag to the site owner that he’s doing something wrong…)

But I digress, some other bloggers (notably, AJay, who posted the original write up that brought my attention to things, now has a nice little reply from Ray King - the guy responsible for AboutUs, and Paul O’Flaherty have been lending their voices to the debate)

I still think what he’s doing is wrong, and his responses to the concerns raised are not yet reassuring me. Especially as his privacy policy simply states that it’s being “worked on”. It would probably have been a good idea to get this in place before they started trawling the internet for personal information about website owners.

The general consensus in the discussion on the site itself is that the website should be “opt in”, as “opt-out is so very spammer-like” - and everyone seems to agree that personal information should not be displayed, and it should be possible to get content permanently removed - including the histories - oh and that stealing content in the first place, without the webmasters’ permissions was a mistake.

Eventually I beleive Ray will have to step back and say “Sorry, this was one big mistake on my part” and start from scratch, with an “opt-in” system. I won’t be opting in.

Here’s a summary of the steps to prevent aboutus.org stealing content from your site.

Block their robot
Add the following lines to your robots.txt (in the “root” folder of your website)

User-agent: AboutUsBot
Disallow: /


Block their IP range
In your .htaccess file (if you’re on Apache) add the following lines:

deny from 66.249.16.

It appears that they now respect Robots.txt, and as Boris pointed out, there are some useful services in that address space.

Block the bot’s user agent
If you do user agent blocking, block the bot’s user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AboutUsBot/0.9; +http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUsBot)


Block the DomainTools.com IP Range
AboutUs.Org uses Domaintools services to generate thumbnail images of site content, so block their IP range too:

deny from 66.249.4.

(I’ve actually blocked the entire 66.249.x.x address space, just to be safe!)

Unfortunately, these steps are only any good if you’ve not already been indexed, there is one thing you can try if you’ve been indexed and had clearly copyrighted content stolen, and that’s contact his upstream host.

Report the site to his upstream host

Once I get a confirmation that they are the upstream provider involved, I’ll be recommending that if you’ve had your content stolen by AboutUs.Org, that you contact this upstream host.

Not sure I like this - a Wiki based on the idea of trawling the net for “about” pages on websites and reproducing them.

Why, I don’t know (other than advertising revenue).

As content on this site is considered copyright, I’ve removed the text they’ve posted about my domains, and replaced with a message stating that my content is mine.

I’d suggest others do the same. Especially as it’s come to my attention that they are showing some postal addresses and phone numbers for domain owners. (I’d guess from Whois records) If you own a website (or several) I suggest you check your page and remove any personal information that they’ve lifted…

I’m not linking to them, as I don’t want to push their google rank any further, however I will be visiting every so often to ensure my copyrighted information hasn’t reappeared.

More info: http://ajaydsouza.com/archives/2006/08/25/aboutusorg-is-it-ethical/

Oh, if I can figure out their IP or their bot’s connection string, I will block it at the server. If anyone already has this, please get in touch.

Update:
Their website is on 66.249.16.207 - so block that IP to start with by adding this line to your htaccess file (on apache) - have yet to establish if the bot is on the same IP, but it’s somewhere to start

deny from 66.249.16.207

I’d recommend that if your domain isn’t already on there, create a record for it, then clear the text. If you set up a user on the site, you can create a “watchlist” of domains you want to keep an eye on for changes. Use this feature to protect yourself further. You shouldn’t have to - but if you do check back from time to time, you can keep an eye on what they’re posting about you.

It would seem that the powers that be have decided that we now only have 8 planets in our solar system.

(follow on from my earlier post… Pondering Planets)

How long before someone tries this over here:

http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/14-year-old-girl-sues-friend-over-missing-ipod/

I mean really, it’s an iPod… it’s hardly the crown jewels - just sort it out yourselves, don’t take your friend to court over it!