It has come to our attention that this service – blog.inf.ed.ac.uk – is being mirrored/proxied/scraped by the site “t e c h f u n l a n d <dot> c o m”, obfuscated here so as not to give them any more publicity.

It means content on blog.inf.ed.ac.uk is being passed off as coming from this other (not related to Informatics or the University of Edinburgh) domain. As all our web server sees is a connection from the web for a web page, just like a regular user’s web request, there is little we can do to stop this.

We have spotted that the requests are coming from a particular nework IP, so we have blocked that, however it seems the site then just presents a previously fetched version of the page, if it had previously successfully fetch the page prior to our block.

We have also contacted the ISP who provided the domain, but nothing has happened.

It is unclear what they hope to achieve by serving our content as theirs, perhaps some reputational benefit. There is at least one page that when fetched, does not present the original blog.inf page, but instead a phishing/scam page (which is not on the blog.inf site), so perhaps another goal of the site is to bury malicious content in otherwise safe content.

Neil

blog.inf.ed.ac.uk being proxied / Computing Systems by is licensed under a