Plagiarism outing in the security industry is on the rise this year, and I’m somewhat happy to see it having a positive effect. I know in the past I’ve run across blog/news feeds that really read fishy and in some cases I’ve looked up article pieces and found them lifted word-for-word from unattributed sources.

I’ll admit, I’ve long had SecTechno in my RSS list, and about every other time that I catch up on that feed, I get that vibe that the content is written by someone else. I’ll even admit to regularly looking up some of that content in Google to see if I get hits. I never did get much, but I see in the last month he’s had his ways righted. Good to see progress and some cleaning up going on in terms of content and plagiarism/attribution. I know of a few other blogs out there that I actually could prove were lifting content without proper citing, but for those I’ve just passively dropped them from my list of links as well as my news feeds. Really, it just deeply annoys me when a blog steals content, but it’s hard to tell if they’re doing so for a profit, doing so as an automated aggregator, or doing so just for that person’s perfornal consumption on a feed that just happened to be public as well. I tend to just be passive and not be a supported of such sites. I can probably guarantee that if I felt this way, passively, about SecTechno, there certainly were others who felt the same and quietly did not respect the author. In light of this outing, that respect can be reforged. 🙂

Hopefully I never fall into that mistake. Plagiarism has been a word I’ve known since middle school and has always been a huge evil. It’s often misunderstood if you didn’t get it drilled properly into your head in school, but essentially if you are passing off an idea (note: this is the tricky part of it) or creation as your own when it is knowingly not your original stuff, that’s usually the spirit of the issue. Hopefully I always remember to link back to any sources I reference (I think I always have).