6 ms·

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ htt

by iab 5y ago

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:... Just so that you have the ability to fully ruin your day

dang 5y ago
We've banned that site and changed the URL above to the article it ripped off and didn't link to, which is like 95th percentile blogspam shamelessness. In this case they even lifted the title as well. That clears 99. Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas.... By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+contains+both+lots+of+melting+glaciers+and+Indigenous+communities%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta... Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.
- perihelions 5y ago
  "simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it" There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original. I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was). I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them. It's a clever evil.
  - dang 5y ago
    Excellent point. Links would be interesting if you happen to have any.
    - perihelions 5y ago
      I very briefly skimmed Reddit for examples. This one is /r/physics' 4th-most-upvoted post from this week, and hasn't been detected yet. It algorithmically substitutes random words for their synonyms (poorly); not the machine language translation I promised, but it's performing the same goal of resisting phrase matching. “We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said Kazuhiro Hada of the “We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here, and possibly malicious). This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I think the technique is widespread and broadly successful, based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings. The machine translation examples are far harder to detect (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the future. The ones I found several years back appear to no longer exist. [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unprecedented-observations-of-famous-black-hole https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unpreceden... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_19_observatories_released_today_promise/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_1... * (Because I could reliably identify the original document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).
      - dang 5y ago
        Fascinating—thank you! Someone should try running the OP through machine translation into some other language and then back into English. I wonder if that would produce the effect you're describing. I might try this later if I remember! Edit: I tried running the first few paragraphs through Google translate into German and back into English. I'll post the two version as replies to this comment. I also did this via Dutch (which unsurprisingly came back closer to English), Italian, and Russian. It seems clear that you are right. The translations are good enough for blogspam and can be used to evade detection. For example, https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentrations+in+this+region%5D+are+at+least+ten+times+higher+than+an+average+river%2C+%E2%80%9Dsays+Hawkings&oq=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentrations+in+this+region%5D+are+at+least+ten+times+higher+than+an+average+river%2C+%E2%80%9Dsays+Hawkings&aqs=chrome..69i57.166j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentr... doesn't find the original. Other sentences I tried do get picked up by Google as references to the OP, but this can be circumvented. For example, this sentence from the English->German->English text gets picked up correctly: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+since+the+poisonous+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+Nutritional+component+for+local+indigenous+communities.&oq=The+discovery+is+worrying+since+the+poisonous+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+Nutritional+component+for+local+indigenous+communities https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+si... But the corresponding sentence from the English->Russian->English text does not: https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+because+the+toxic+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+component+of+the+diet+of+local+indigenous+communities.&oq=This+finding+is+worrying+because+the+toxic+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+component+of+the+diet+of+local+indigenous+communities https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+bec...
- mef51 5y ago
  Thanks for the change!
- iab 5y ago
  My bad - will be more careful next time.

by iab 5y ago

dang 5y ago

We've banned that site and changed the URL above to the article it ripped off and didn't link to, which is like 95th percentile blogspam shamelessness. In this case they even lifted the title as well. That clears 99. Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releasing-huge-amounts-of-mercury-into-rivers-2/ https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas.... By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+contains+both+lots+of+melting+glaciers+and+Indigenous+communities%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta... Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.

perihelions 5y ago
"simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it" There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original. I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was). I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them. It's a clever evil.
- dang 5y ago
  Excellent point. Links would be interesting if you happen to have any.
  - perihelions 5y ago
    I very briefly skimmed Reddit for examples. This one is /r/physics' 4th-most-upvoted post from this week, and hasn't been detected yet. It algorithmically substitutes random words for their synonyms (poorly); not the machine language translation I promised, but it's performing the same goal of resisting phrase matching. “We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said Kazuhiro Hada of the “We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here, and possibly malicious). This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I think the technique is widespread and broadly successful, based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings. The machine translation examples are far harder to detect (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the future. The ones I found several years back appear to no longer exist. [0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unprecedented-observations-of-famous-black-hole https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unpreceden... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_19_observatories_released_today_promise/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_1... * (Because I could reliably identify the original document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).
    - dang 5y ago
      Fascinating—thank you! Someone should try running the OP through machine translation into some other language and then back into English. I wonder if that would produce the effect you're describing. I might try this later if I remember! Edit: I tried running the first few paragraphs through Google translate into German and back into English. I'll post the two version as replies to this comment. I also did this via Dutch (which unsurprisingly came back closer to English), Italian, and Russian. It seems clear that you are right. The translations are good enough for blogspam and can be used to evade detection. For example, https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentrations+in+this+region%5D+are+at+least+ten+times+higher+than+an+average+river%2C+%E2%80%9Dsays+Hawkings&oq=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentrations+in+this+region%5D+are+at+least+ten+times+higher+than+an+average+river%2C+%E2%80%9Dsays+Hawkings&aqs=chrome..69i57.166j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentr... doesn't find the original. Other sentences I tried do get picked up by Google as references to the OP, but this can be circumvented. For example, this sentence from the English->German->English text gets picked up correctly: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+since+the+poisonous+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+Nutritional+component+for+local+indigenous+communities.&oq=The+discovery+is+worrying+since+the+poisonous+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+Nutritional+component+for+local+indigenous+communities https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+si... But the corresponding sentence from the English->Russian->English text does not: https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+because+the+toxic+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+component+of+the+diet+of+local+indigenous+communities.&oq=This+finding+is+worrying+because+the+toxic+metal+can+accumulate+in+marine+animals%2C+which+are+a+key+component+of+the+diet+of+local+indigenous+communities https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+bec...
mef51 5y ago
Thanks for the change!
iab 5y ago
My bad - will be more careful next time.