Case Study: How Google Hosts & Funds A Copyright-Infringing Web Site

Color me tired. I got a report of a site that reprinted one of our articles without permission. Checking it out, I discovered that miserable combination of someone making money off content they don't own, paying nothing to host that stolen content on Google's Blogger service and earning off that content through Google's AdSense ads. And reporting the infringement is oh so easy. Not. So here's the fun loving site: The most current article shown comes from Search Engine Land. It's reprinted in its entirety, without permission. There's even a credit line shoved in at the end: New [...]

Filed in: Features: General, Google: AdSense, Google: Blogger


Google’s Blogger Makes Up 2% Of All Malware Hosts

Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware from News.com reports Google's Blogger accounts "for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts." Sophos, an antivirus vendor, published a report showing the state of malware injections and attacks throughout the web. Specifically, hackers can set up "malicious blogs" on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs. The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn't it ironic that Googl [...]

Filed in: Google: Blogger, Google: Security, Legal: Security


Google Blocks Anti-Obama Blogs Flagged Incorrectly As Spam

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't being abused -- especially given how it says these "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can. NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I've seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to pub [...]

Filed in: Google: Blogger, Google: Web Search


Google Deletes Custom Search Blog After Marking It As Spam

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked? from Google Blogoscoped quickly reported what appeared to be a hack of Google's official Custom Search Blog. But what really happened was that Google marked their own blog as a spam blog and ultimately removed the blog from Blogger, allowing someone else to claim the URL. Google sent Google Blogoscoped a response detailing the issue: Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Goo [...]

Filed in: Google: Blogger, Google: Marketing, Google: Security


Google Shuts Down Blogger After Threats To New Zealand Politician

Google axes death-threat blog at The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google finally shut down CYFSWATCH New Zealand blog after numerous complaints from governmental officials in New Zealand. The blog, hosted on Google's Blogger service, reportedly wrote a death threat against a New Zealand politician. When you access the blog at this time, it says "NONE" and that is followed with "No posts match your query." But the Google Cache still shows blog posts from the blog, at this point in time. More details at The Sydney Morning Herald. [...]

Filed in: Google: Blogger, Google: Legal, Google: Outside US, Legal: Censorship


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