[arch-general] Abuse of arch wiki?

[Eli Schwartz]

On 9/24/20 1:05 PM, LuKaRo wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was searching for information on firejail, when the fourth hit on my
> search engine was:
> https://www.linuxsecrets.com/archlinux-wiki/wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firejail.html.
> This looks like an exact copy of our archlinux wiki (including the
> header bar) but hosted on Google's servers with no administrative
> contact given. They also seem to run additional obfuscated JavaScript on
> "their" copy of arch wiki.
> 
> Their main page's "about us" page gives just a 404 error, and there is
> no further imprint given. However, on their main page it says "Copyright
> Linuxsecrets.com. All Rights Reserved". It looks like they at least
> tried to copy ArchLinux Forums, Ubuntu Forums and Linux Mint Forums as
> well.
> 
> I know that GNU FDL allows redistribution of content, but I do think
> that copying the entire wiki with no attribution or information at all
> violates at least ethical principles. They also copy the wiki login
> page, which is also interesting from a security point of view. An
> unknowing user is misleaded by this content, and considering that this
> site was the fourth hit on a common search term in my search engine I'm
> worried by the impact. At least I wanted to make you aware of that our
> arch wiki contents are copied without any notice.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=247141
https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/i1d8ab/what_is_up_with_this_website_is_it_just_a_mirror/

As far as I can tell, this is just a mirror? The attribution is pretty
clear, it claims to actually be wiki.archlinux.org and refers to it
being graciously hosted by www.archlinux.org on

https://www.linuxsecrets.com/archlinux-wiki/wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:About.html

(Mind you, they have various broken links due to statically rewriting
all urls as "foo.html" instead of the original "/index.php/foo" and this
then causes browsers to mishandle any pages that contain a ":" in it,
e.g. "Special:Random" or "Help:Style" or "ArchWiki:About".)


Mirroring a really old copy of the wiki is kind of unethical because
they're spreading ancient out of date knowledge pretending to be modern,
but I don't see how it's a problem for attribution.

Moreover, they're not the only ones doing similar, see for example
https://aur.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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