How to get an app banned?

[Ben]

I can't find a way to report an app doing dumb stuff on GAE, but this
guy:

http://fsd4353.appspot.com/bHlvaS5vL29tbnRwYXRtY2NtY211aXk=

is scraping my content from http://playtomic.com/community

to show porn ads & pull traffic from Google -- one of my visitors was
nice enough to email me about it.

I'd really like to get it removed.

[Barry Hunter]

http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?hl=en-US&contact_type=contact_policy&rd=1

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[Krishna]

Wow! Looks like the guy has 16,000 such urls indexed by Google! 

http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Afsd4353.appspot.com%2F#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=site:fsd4353.appspot.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=5104fce57ec41299&biw=1024&bih=667

[Chris Farmiloe]

Ben, when things are fetched using UrlFetch the app-id is send along with the request in the headers somewhere. It should be feasible to block Mr. fsd4353 from your site.

I believe it is in the User-Agent.

[Jay Young]

Correct.

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Thanks for reporting it Ben. Please use that link above. We'll scope it out, contact the developer and take it down if need be.

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

Correct.

--

[Ben]

Thanks everyone. I reported it through that contact link, not sure
how I missed that when I was looking for a way to report the guy.

Cheers
Ben

[Ben]

Google's DMCA team got back to me today finally, I lodged a complaint
there before I started looking for how to contact the App Engine team
about it. They were kindly informed me since it's just a proxy they
are going to continue hosting my stolen content complete with
pornographic ads.

Between that and the lack of action on this end I decided to take
myself out of the equation - I'm now redirecting any requests from the
application to the Google App Engine website. You probably won't have
the problem of them ranking high enough to lure visitors from search
engines at least as happened to me, but at least you get the pretty
porn ads.

Thanks,
Ben

[Brandon Wirtz]

That's no fun, you should send the APP Engine requests something more fun...
Like bit torrents of barnyard animals mating. Or if you want to get the
site taken down quickly forward the traffic to Sony licensed music.

[Ben]

Pretty sure it's technically a phishing site now since all links get
rewritten to reside inside the scraper's website including
registration & login:

http://fsd4353.appspot.com/dHA6L3cub2dlY21hY3V0L2V2Y0xnbnNyaWVhJmFzdj1yZWNuaXU9dHA6L3BlZ24ub2dlY21faGNubGduM2NuaXUlRHRwOi9wZWduLm9nZWNtJnRwPWVzZzU0MzdmODM2Mzg4MjcxNWVodHMvd3dnb2wuby9jb25zU3JpZW9pP2V2Yz1ocHNpZXR1Jm90bmVodHMvYXBuaWVnb2wuby9hL29mb2klRm90bmUzaHRzL2FwbmllZ29sLm8vbG1sYSZpPTBlZDRlMzgyMGVkY2E3NGM=

That should get them shut down fast enough.

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Turns out there were a bunch more terms of service violations being committed by the developer of this application. I couldn't get the porn ads to load (that could also have been a violation).

Anyway, the app and other apps by this developer have been disabled.

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

[Ben]

Aaaaaaaaaand they're shut down. Just under 3 hours to do it this way,
vs. a week to get rejected by their DMCA group and 6 days of nothing
from the GAE group.

On May 23, 3:11 pm, Ben <nospam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Pretty sure it's technically a phishing site now since all links get
> rewritten to reside inside the scraper's website including
> registration & login:
>

> http://fsd4353.appspot.com/dHA6L3cub2dlY21hY3V0L2V2Y0xnbnNyaWVhJmFzdj...

[Ben]

Thanks for finally taking care of it.

If you're taking suggestions:

1) it's very hard to find out where to contact GAE to report abuse -
the link Barry mentioned does not even exist on most pages, the only
page I can even see it on is itself down the bottom.

2) It would be awesome if anyone ever replied, I filled out the
complaint form shortly after Barry revealed the URL and never heard
anything until the separate, earlier complaint was rejected for
hilariously bad reasoning. I really don't see what's complicated
about a generic internet spammer scraping content (or technically
proxying, though whether he saves the content or not hardly seems
relevant), it happens anywhere scammers and spammers can make a dime
dishonestly, it should be a lot easier and a lot faster to report.

Ben

PS. Not sure how you missed the porn ads but you can still see them in
Google's cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PY0Fc1PmAJIJ:fsd4353.appspot.com/bHlvaS5vL29tbnRwYXRtY2NtY211aXk%3D+http://fsd4353.appspot.com/bHlvaS5vL29tbnRwYXRtY2NtY211aXk%3D&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&source=www.google.com

<!--JuicyAds v2.0-->
<iframe hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0 frameborder=0 marginheight=0
marginwidth=0 width=632 height=142 scrolling=no allowtransparency=true
src=http://adserver.juicyads.com/adshow.php?adzone=48052></iframe>
<!--JuicyAds END-->

On May 23, 5:45 pm, "Ikai Lan (Google)" <ika...@google.com> wrote:
> Turns out there were a bunch more terms of service violations being
> committed by the developer of this application. I couldn't get the porn ads
> to load (that could also have been a violation).
>
> Anyway, the app and other apps by this developer have been disabled.
>
> Ikai Lan
> Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine
> Blog:http://googleappengine.blogspot.com
> Twitter:http://twitter.com/app_engine
> Reddit:http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Ben <nospam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Pretty sure it's technically a phishing site now since all links get
> > rewritten to reside inside the scraper's website including
> > registration & login:
>

> >http://fsd4353.appspot.com/dHA6L3cub2dlY21hY3V0L2V2Y0xnbnNyaWVhJmFzdj...

[Ikai Lan (Google)]

Ben,

I understand your frustrations, but do realize that shutting a user down is not as simple as waving a banhammer. We try to give users the benefit of the doubt, and we verify with our legal team whether it is within our right to shut a user down. I'm glad this process is in place, but I'd rather let 10 abuse apps sit around longer than they should than avoid shutting down a legitimate user.

I agree that our abuse handling can be improved - this was definitely something that was considered as part of our plan to take App Engine out of preview. People on the internet are scammy, and it costs a non-trivial amount of money to fight bad people. Who knew?

Ikai Lan 
Developer Programs Engineer, Google App Engine

Blog: http://googleappengine.blogspot.com 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/app_engine

Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/appengine

[nickmilon]

@Ikai +1

"I'm glad this process is in place, but I'd rather let 10
abuse apps sit around longer than they should than avoid shutting down
a
legitimate user."

Nick Milon

> >http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PY0Fc1PmAJIJ:fsd...

[Brandon Wirtz]

Are we sure Ikai works at Google? I mean the adsense and search team seem
to delist you, kick you out of adsense and then send you a message saying
"You are banished" 3 weeks later when you get a hold of them they say. "Oh
we're sorry about that apparently you had a swear word in Arabic on your
site and it offended the outsourced quality guidelines staff member who
reviewed your site" (True story).