Tomorrow's Business Today
The fake websites spreading real news
A curious army of robots seems to be at work with a fiendish plan to steal from hacks and make life harder for flaks.
What they do is copy out stories from respectable websites and reproduce them, including the hack’s byline, on websites that look a bit like the official ones, unless you pay attention.
So, some of my work gets picked up, via commercial deals or just resource sharing arrangements on websites like Yahoo Finance or MSN.com.
There’s an army of imitators that seem to move very quickly.
Mark Kleinman of Sky News seems to be a bigger recipient of this, since he’s perhaps the best-known finance hack and the most likely to get a scoop.
His news is picked up by odd sites that are presumably compiled by agents.
These sites come and go – MK.FM was once high up in searches, though it seems to be defunct now.
What are the robots playing at?
I don’t know, but presumably there’s a penny a click for advertising.
If you can get a robot to generate a hundred fake websites a day that grab 10,000 clicks before they get removed, I guess that’s a business.
A depressing, lonely, rather pointless business, but then the new web is a lot like that.
Bring back Netscape.
At the moment, this looks harmless enough. A robot steals a few pence from a publisher. Which is used to far worse than that.
Then it closes itself down, then it moves on.
It is a bit wild west, isn’t it? Where does it end?
Moreover, supposing I write something for The Independent that has a clear error in it. This doesn’t happen very often, but it happens.
You, in your role as reasonable PR person, ask me if I might have got that bit wrong. We have a chat. I see your point. And I change or remove the offending bit.
Your client is reminded what it pays you for; everyone moves on.
What if it’s a much more serious error appearing on what looks like a respectable news site. There’s no one to complain to. It’s nothing to do with me.
And our IT department has better things to do than faff about finding out who might be behind the fake website.
At the moment, this looks like a small irritation rather than a big problem.
It could become one though, perhaps for all of us.
Please send candidates for press release of the day to:
Press release of the day
Your annual energy bill could be £6,400 by 2036 if recent price rises continue at the same pace says the forecasting analyst Predictionist.
That figure assumes that bills keep rising at 13% a year, as they have been doing.
Predictionist says: “This is a warning scenario, not a prediction that every household will face the same bill. The point is to show how quickly a familiar annual cost can become alarming when percentage rises compound over time.
“Energy bills are especially painful because households cannot simply opt out of heating, lighting and cooking. Even a smaller rise can force difficult choices when budgets are already stretched.”
Stories that will keep rolling
1) FCA warns of “arms race” to keep up with AI use in financial services. FT
2) Pubs toast World Cup victory over Mexico. City AM
3) FTSE rises amid deal frenzy. Investors’ Chronicle
4) EasyJet agrees to £5.2bn takeover “in principle”. BBC
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