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The Podjacker Threat

Posted by Zonk on from the save-the-children dept.

Schlemphfer writes "As everyone knows by now, podcasting has taken off in a big way. But over the past week, several tech journals and The Daily Source Code have reported on the threat of 'podjacking,' the creation of an alternate RSS feed without the consent of the podcast's owner. I'm the host of a podcast, which has the dubious distinction of being the first widely-publicized victim of a podjacking. To teach others from my experiences I have posted an article entitled Preventing and Surviving a Podjacking (also available in PDF). So far this story has attracted widespread but generally inept media and blogger coverage. This article sets the record straight on what really happened, and shows the simple steps every podcaster should take to protect their shows from podjacking."

2 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Been There by somethinghollow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I noticed several sites were ripping off my content from my RSS feeds. Some of them are ad sites that, no doubt, gather like-minded blog posts, publish them on their site, and shit ads all over them. Others seem to be attempting to do some sort of service. What with Google punishing duplicate content posts, I don't want my content redistributed without my permission. So, I implemented a system with mod_rewrite and PHP on my site that checks the user agent before allowing access to any page. If the user agent is unknown, it shows a page saying that I don't know who they are but I'll see about allowing them access to my site. I then enter their user agent in a database, after doing some research, and decide whether to allow them or not. Eventually, I'm going to tie this into my robots.txt file so that it denies robots there (if they bother to look) in addition to showing the robot a access denied page.
     
    It isn't the easiest solution (takes a lot of time to manage) and won't always work (e.g. they set their UA to one that looks like a valid browser or some other UA that I allow), but it clears most of the riffraff, i think.

  2. Re:PLEASE, enough with the words! by Data+Link+Layer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I use the word fortnight as much as possible.