Shady company relaunches popular old tech blogs, steals writers' identities

I didn't read the whole article, but had something similar happen to me.

For about a decade, I maintained a list of farm shares in my region. I spent some time building out a custom web application which let folks slice and dice the data (type of farmshare, cost, pickup cities, etc) to help them find the right one.

It was a huge lift to get all the data updated every winter. After a year or three of trying to figure out how to do the update sustainably and failing, I decided to let it go. I put it in read-only mode for a year or two, put notices about stale content on the site, and then finally let the domain name expire.

A few months after I do that, I start to get emails from farmers wanting to update their listing. Which is weird, because I thought the site was gone?

Someone had bought the domain name, harvested all the content (I think from archive.is or similar), put it up on their own site, and were using it for link farming. They hadn't changed the email address or anything else and I don't think they updated the content. There was certainly no contact info for them on the site.

It pissed me off a bit, but I didn't figure there was anything I could do.

Just checked now and the site appears to be gone, so must not have been a moneymaker.

There is a whole industry centered around this practice of grabbing expired domains, putting back the content based on internet archive snapshots, and using the SEO juice to help rank money sites. Nobody will read these blogs, it's just for google crawler's eyes.

I think this happened to my old site gitready.com, which now has some of my original posts wrapped in https://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/16/convert-git-svn-tag...

The index has a pile of fake conference / ads at the bottom. https://gitready.com/

Basically I let the domain lapse and now this happened :\

Discussion (53 points, 2 days ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40928469

I hadn't even realised that sites like TUAW had closed down. I recall seeing them over the past couple of decades, and if someone linked to them now, I'd read the post in the full belief it was the same entity.

And I would believe that the article was written by the name attached, if that name had been writing for the site for a decade.

Shady as!

And while the AI companies are completely to blame, it's grossly unethical, I feel the owners of IP like those blogs should only sell with contract conditions retaining good reputation for the name. It's like when a business owner names their business after themselves (famous example in Australia: Dick Smith's Electronics) and when selling, they're incentivized to ensure their name and reputation remain untarnished.

Pretty impossible to steal an identity over the internet, because no one has identities. On the internet users use accounts, which serve the same purpose for some use cases, but they are definitely not identities.

That's gonna change very soon, and everyone will have untheftable identities over the internet and in real life. I was personally the victim of identity theft in real life and i got sued subsequently by another person.

Identity theft in real life, and account impersonation over the internet will be solved soon.