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Comment by xthestreams | Hacker News Reader

cnr.it is a domain which belongs to the Italian Research Council, and that subdomain seems to be a blog by the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystems.

These are not scammers, it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one. Probably it wasn't even meant to be public. But because of the prestige of the domain, it becomes first in relevant searches.

If you track down the author and send him a quick mail, I'm 100% sure they'll help.

I've worked at CNR.

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Correct, it looks more like a page containing useful info for their users/students etc

There are plenty of scam pages, but specifically this one doesn't look like it

> it's probably an amateur researcher which published that information in a blog which is usually read by no-one.

Ah, but this is the new method of SEO trickery and credential scamming. Publishing a 'guest post' on a high-ranking blog subdomain of a trusted instititution. There was a story of someone doing this on Harvard University's blogs, which I can't find right now.

But I found something even better. An actual UpWork posting promising to publish your crap on Chapman.edu's university blog:

https://www.upwork.com/services/product/5-high-da-dofollow-g...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Research_Council_(Ita...

Still, it appears someone at CNR copy-pasted someone else's blog and published it as their own.

No, the very first thing in the blog post is a link to the original, so it’s highly unlikely they wanted to pretend to be the author.

More like someone who didn’t care much about copyright or license decided to back up information they found useful in their personal blog.

Honestly, a researcher should know better to not plagiarize or to give attribution better than that. This is core in their job. If they do exactly this in their papers, it's going to be bad for them and they know it.

It's good they linked to the original post and that the link is the first thing we see, but nothing says that it's the source, and no paragraph explains that the content comes from elsewhere.

I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.

I see no malicious intents, it's probably done in good faith, but meh.

To the author: did you try to reach out? I'm sure something can be done about it if it bothers you. I expect the author of this copy to be receptive.

> I also don't see why the content should be copy-pasted instead of just a link.

Quite possibly an easy way to preserve the content in case the original goes offline and to share it with colleagues. Perhaps they wanted to link to it from some long-lived or even printed material. Not saying it’s the best way to do so, but it’s plausible and not malicious.

It’s plausible and not malicious, understandable too, but it's not hard to say it in a sentence at the beginning of the post.

This is a public blog, not some internal website.

Anyway, my previous comment probably sounds harsh because it is the way I wrote it (because I previously worked in a research lab, so I kinda feel disappointed), but I still consider this a minor fuck up and it happens to everyone, for sure.

That's utterly illegal though

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