Views and Reviews

Dotnetspider Fights Back

National Do Not Call Registry Violators

Call Centers becoming Comedy Centers

Everyone is aware of the most disgusting and harrowing experiences that we are put to particularly during our afternoon siesta due to bad telemarketers selling credit cards, personal loans etc. It is said that in United States it is bad to call a person on a mobile phone unless you know him personally. However, the situation in India is such that mobile phone is the prima facie target for telemarketers. Sometime back TRAI stipulated that every financial and telecom operator should maintain a Do Not Call registry so that people can register there. Once registered, the telemarketers on behalf of those organizations should not call those numbers. We also have a comprehensive list of those numbers summarized here. TRAI has now gone one step ahead in implementing a one-point National Do Not Call Registry. Once the people register their numbers here after forty-five days the calls should stop. Violating telemarketers start to face the music ranging from a penalty of INR 500 per incident to disconnection of the telecom service.

With this in place, I also just came across a weblog at http://www.vinayahs.com/  where Hutch started to spam 30 times per day a DND subscriber. He was apprehensive about the message count that should run in 45 days. I am just reminded of a proverb “Laughter is the best tonic for all diseases”. I think the organizations invest crores in call centers. But the way call centers behave particularly during the subscription/unsubscription, we are forced to think whether they have transitioned themselves into Comedy Centers to entertain people. Call Center people grow abusive also. We can not forget the ‘Call-Girl-Type’ Devi of Citibank who interfered with us in January 2007. http://www.codeproject.com/script/profile/whos_who.asp?id=3032865 had another Call (Center) Girl incident to say. I have discussed about it over here.

There are few more interesting incidents to say.

1) Once a HSBC CallCenter guy called me for credit card. He had a bad vocabulary of tagging every line with “You See. You See“. I replied him humourously that I can not see you on the phone but only hear you.

2) ICICI CallCenter guys plead at you like anything to force you to fall to thier traps.

Website Plagiarism– Next Generation Copyright Infringment Trends

One of the most intimidating trends that cause worries and sleeplessness to the webmasters and content owners that are going online is the widespread Website Plagiarism. According to WordWeb desktop dictionary, Plagiarism is defined as “A piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work”. I really don’t know how people get succumbed to plagiarising other’s work.

We have good amount of measures now to “contain” the older forms of content owner intellectual property infringments. A few of them are outlined below:

1. Windows-based Software Piracy Reporting
2. NASSCOM Anti-Piracy Activities
   1. India Antipiracy Hotline (Toll Free. Works only from a BSNL/MTNL line)

However, the latest trend that is catching up now is the one which is infecting weblogs, articles on premiere technology websites like CodeProject, CodeGuru. Of late, we CPians (Code Project members) were discussing with good furore on our intellectual property hosted on CodeProject being vandalized by cheap websites like a Keralite outsourcing agency called ‘LogicIndia‘. They seem to operate a Plagarizing vehicle called ‘BuzzyCode‘ which captures articles from CodeProject unrelentingly, creates fake profiles on its account using captivating names like Princess Diana etc and posts as if its own. A fellow CPian had taken pains to inform them but he got a curt and blunt reply stating that ‘Members has posted thier articles and they don’t plagarize’. Read this conversation thread.

A few of the quick permalinks that aide the reader in getting the full picture of Website Plagiarism that is being unleashed by the LogicLab group. Currently we find four websites that are chaining up from this underworld network:

• Dotnetspider (The innocuous looking discussion forum associated with the Plaigarizing network)
• BuzzyCode (The Plagiarizing Vehicle)
• LogicLab (The operator and the brainbehind)
• LogicIndia (The Contact Us in all the above sites have a live chat link to msnim:chat?contact=software@logicindia.net [MSN Messenger Quick Instant Messaging Link]

When you visit LogicIndia website, the title bar says it as “MCSE Training USA – CCNA Training UK – RHCE Nigeria India”. I think thier association with Nigeria is befitting.  Nigeria is known for many for the zillions of email scams that everyone recieves almost on a minute-by-minute basis. Check out this Nigerian Email Fraud Gallery.

I have anyway reported this issue, at least as a little service to contain Website Plaigarism to Chennai Cybercrime cell. Let me keep this post updated over any responses that I recieve from them.

There is also a sentimental touch with respect to Article Plaigarism. This might look a bit harsh too but I think elixirs are never sweet. An article which is brainchild of the author is like his wife. Thieving thier articles is like abducting another person’s wife illegally. I think governments should treat this with utmost importance and bring this menace into control at an earliest. We all know of the great epic, Ramayana where the greatest Siva Devotee (Ravana) and his empire just fell down to crumbles only because of his female greed (aka) lust towards other’s properties. You can check out the brief narration of the incident from the words of Dr. C. S. Shah.

I did a brief and quick research on this topic and found that there is a good webservice called CopyScape, which helps us protect ourselves from being victimized from website vandalism and plaigiarism. But I am just to learn how effectively to use this webservice still. If some one is already using this, please share your thoughts and learnings as comments so that others can also be benefitted. Let us together make the Web – a peaceful environment for bona fide content and eliminate heartburns.

Related Links on Website Plagiarisms:

1. Tips on Dealing with Website Plagiarism by Amit Agarval in his ‘Digital Inspiration‘.
2. The Furious “War against Plagiarism” in CodeProject:
   1. Colin Mackay’s Article Theft.
   2. Discussion Forum Links
      1. BuzzyCode JOTD (Joke Of The Day)
      2. Grumble Mumble
      3. Vasudevan Deepak Kumar
      4. BuzzyCode = Dotnetspider
      5. Who is BuzzyCode.com????
      6. Hey Nish! Look At This!
      7. BuzzyCode (again)
      8. CodeProject Steals Articles  (You may need to check this thread’s parent thread which is the Millennium Comedy since thieves are trying to accuse the owners as ‘thieves’.). Sometimes, elders says that mentally deranged people normally call you “You are only mental. I am not mental“. Isn’t this something similar?

Tip:

Sometime back, I have been posting about my achievements in Dotnetspider through the following links:

1. Winner of July 2007 Dotnetspider
2. Featured in Dotnetspider SpiderTeam
3. Winner of April 2007 Dotnetspider

These links have the following points to note with emphasis and double underline.

It is my pure humble personal interest to help the newbie in technology in thier technical questions and answers. It is a sheer mental satisfaction to help beginners by leading them by hand into the journey through .NET. “One candle lights another and in the process none grows dimmer rather the room gets still brighter“.

1. I don’t have any commercial partnership with Spider group of websites whatsoever.
2. I have also reported a few of the violating articles to DotNetSpider. Let me keep posted here over the responses that I recieve from them.