Two new WordPress plugins were released in the past few weeks. Both promise to help defend against scraping but how much security do they actually provide?

Earlier today, I ran across a post on Digg that referenced a blog readability test.
The idea behind the test is simple. You type in the URL of your blog or site and it tells you the approximate reading level required to understand it. It got me curious about the readibility of this site so I [...]

A presentation by Jason Calacanis at LeWeb3 earlier this month drew attention the problem of Web “pollution” as a threat to the Internet itself.
According to Calacanis, Usenet is an case study on what is currently happening to the Web. In his speech, he stated that Usenet, ten to fifteen years ago, was a very [...]

In a recent interview on b-l-o-g-g-e-r.com, Dennis de Bernardy commented on the issue of content theft and spam blogs
Bernardy, the creator of Semilogic Pro, which is a pack of themes and plugins for WordPress targeted at business users, said that the problem was due to RSS feeds and recommended what many would call drastic action.
There [...]

To offer a quick update on the trackback/comment spam attack I reported on yesterday, the attack is continuing in earnest today but things seem to be much more under control now.
reCAPTCHA is still holding the comment spam at bay and I have swapped out Akismet for Defensio in hopes of reducing the number of trackbacks [...]

Over the past 96 hours Plagiarism Today, as well as likely other sites, has been the subject of a massive spam attack across a variety of formats and domains.
The attack, which appears to have begun sometime on Friday, has been persistent for the past four days. However, at this juncture, it appears that my defenses [...]

Article Updated
According to a recent AP article, the Whois service, a series of databases with information about the individuals that register domains, has come under fire from privacy advocates and a new proposal seeks to do away with the service altogether.
Such a move would be a tremendous blow to law enforcement, lawyers and researchers that [...]

Feed autodiscovery is one of the most powerful tools available for encouraging feed usage and subscription. Theoretically at least, by giving browsers and feed readers an easy way to identify the feed and users an intuitive way to subscribe to it, more people will take advantage of it.
However, when a reader of this site had [...]

It’s Monday again and that means it is time for another 40-minute episode of the Copyright 2.0 show. This week the show is filled to the brim with the usual copyright news, humor and sarcasm that has made the show so special. Also included is a special birthday announcement and my pathetic attempt to rewrite [...]

I often get asked by reporters and bloggers alike exactly how bad scraping is on the Web. I discuss my past experiments on the topic and how, depending on your keywords, suspicious traffic starts showing up with the first post.
However, as I was searching for information on IE7 security flaws for another site I’m [...]