UD under cyber attack?

_{Salvador Cordova

December 28, 2013

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A lot of premier discussions at UD recently do not bring up google hits, but other sites which reference discussions at UD come up on google. This seems odd and deliberate. I cannot say for sure but this seems suspicious.

A comment by fryether (still trapped in the moderation queue, which I have no authority to release) said:

As an IT Professional, I am shocked that if you look up “uncommon descent” on google the only reference to the actual site is behe.uncommondescent.com along with a plethora of anti-ID sites. Compare the results to the BING and you see a huge difference. No I make no money off of bing. I don’t even use it myself. Although I might start if google keeps this up.

I used to be able to use google to search the UD archives (the internal search tool a UD isn’t as good). Then the google hits slowly died. If google makes revenue through UD, this also hurts them. If any of you know how to fix this problem, feel free to comment.

Comments

As top hit, with Behe's sub blog footnoted to it: >> Uncommon Descent - Serving the Intelligent Design Community www.uncommondescent.com/? Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. Michael Behe's Blog The blog of Michael J. Behe on Uncommon Descent. Evolution Evolution, aging, and death: Female octopus doesn't really ... Media I was thinking of adding “Why are popular science media so ... Human evolution Paleoanthrolopologist: Century-old theory of human evolution ... More results from uncommondescent.com » >> muy interesante kairosfocus

Yeah, Uncommon Descent is back on google! bornagain77

I believe it's scandalous that behemoths such as Google should be able to hold patents for such a long time. It should have been subject to a kind of 'eminent domain' action, once they'd made their pile - long ago. Especially, when you consider Tim Berners-Lee refused to profit from inventing the very Internet, itself. We know that the behemoths form cartels, to the detriment of their host societies. Axel

Spot on, Robert. No question. Axel

I noticed I couldn't get into this forum unless I went into the blog. This for about three weeks or so. i always go in by google. Hard to believe intrigue but you never know. This forum presents knowledgable thread writers and sharp posters and this is how revolutions succeed. Words are dangerous to the bad guys or the good guys. Equal opportunity danger. People in high places watch the words of the people more then we would like to know . Robert Byers

Google will block a website if it has text in the html that cannot be read by any user. This will happen if the font is too small (happened to me, once!), or outside the visible page (as here). Ian Thompson

JWTruthInLove:
pretty telling if you ask me!
How do you mean? Mapou

Are you guys sure that the site is HACKED? The viagra issue was pointed out to Barry months ago, and he decided not to react... pretty telling if you ask me! JWTruthInLove

Source code mentions "viagra" 4 times; source code of this page. Box

RE: Ian Thompson #21 It is indeed compromised source code! The javascript source points back to cloudfare.net, which would explain why network tools would resolve the domain to that provider (at the network level). I'm guessing the real UD is hosted by GoDaddy. I wonder if the theme used for the platform was susceptible to being compromised, or if it is time to select a new blog platform altogether. Also, I noticed that when I attempted to submit a reply earlier, that Cloudfare.net was attempting to validate me via "captcha". Definitely, not good for UD. Time to escalate this matter! ciphertext

Great sleuthing, Thompson. Bravo. Mapou

The source code for the UD home page has the viagra in the body at top:-517px That is, invisible to us. This is all about money and stealing our pagerank. The source code at UD has been hacked. Open the source with your browser, and look for string "<body " It is not a domain name issue. Ian Thompson

RE: Ian Thompson #19 The IP address that the URL you provided resolves to the following: 141.101.117.107. That IP addresses is served by CLOUDFLARENET - CloudFlare, Inc. A European location (Geo code anyway). That IP (if correct) hosts 10 websites. One of which (slaptheguru.com) is listed in spam databases. http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/141.101.117.107 I don't suppose the webmaster(s) for THIS Uncommon Descent web blog would dispute this IP assignment? When you perform a DNS Lookup for www.uncommondescent.com, what you find is this: http://www.tcpiputils.com/dns-lookup/www.uncommondescent.com/A However, when you perform a domain search without the "WWW" host name, and you get a different IP. One that is maintained by GoDaddy, it would appear. http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/domain/uncommondescent.com This at least suggests to me that there could be a problem with "name" resolution. I'm leaning towards malicious intent. Though, I don't think Google is responsible, their systems are probably not resolving the correct addresses. ciphertext

You have been hacked. See https://uncommondescent.com/blogs/shop/viagra_professional.php !!!! Ian Thompson

Google rank at http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php still gives UD as 5/10 Ian Thompson

I don't know if this means anything but Dr. Liddle's site, theskepticalzone.com pops right up in google despite being ranked 8,310,378 at alexa.com. Alexa has UD at 410,572. That seems a bit odd, no? lpadron

I am sure you do, but probably no information there (as in 2006) Ian Thompson

Does any at UD use Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home) to check for error messages, submit sitemaps, look at search terms and other statistics etc? It is free. Ian Thompson

Google is the main financial support of the Church of Singularity. Their goal is to create the first human-level general artificial intelligence. This is the primary reason that Google has invested so heavily in AI and robots recently. They even hired Ray Kurzweil, one of the main Cardinals of the Singularitarian Church, to head their machine learning division. They believe it's their ticket to immortality. Singularitarians are virulently pro-Darwin, anti-ID, anti-religion and especially anti-Christianity. It would not surprise me one bit to find out that one or two Google employees of the Singularitarian persuasion are futzing with the search parameters with regard to UD. If this is what's happening, it would be cause for a lawsuit, IMO. But then again, the lack of Google hits could be due to other factors as well. So we need to keep an open mind until we figure out what's going on. Mapou

There is a very large Christian forum in the use, called, Christian Forums, in which there are now posters exposing the folly of the scientistic establishment with a will; where, before, callow, 'know-nothing' atheists used to swagger and posture as beacons of scientific knowledge, and virtually intimidate the Christian readers and posters with their nonsense about evolution, naturalism, etc. The scientismificists are whole lot more nervous and humble these days. I only used to post sporadically, but have left it to others, when I saw they were, themselves, on the attack now. But I often linked to UD, as the basis of my posts. Some of the callow swaggering, young atheists remind me of Churchill's dictum concerning the Nazis: 'They're either at your feet or at your throat.' When you deride them in response to their sneering and mockery, the first thing they do is go running to the mods complaining! Incidentally, seemingly, also, a sign of the times, there's been a lot of praise of Pope Francis' economic strictures on DU (Democratic Underground, a liberal and preponderantly atheist blog), although inevitably the 'hard core' of die-hards remain obdurate, ever focused solely on their own sexual demands and with scant interest in broader issues, still less other people's rights. Axel

It's inconceivable, imo, that behemoths, such as Google and Microsoft, in this omnipresent medium, should not be in cahoots with US Intelligence and, secondarily, other national intelligence agencies, with a view to marginalising independent and almost, ipso facto, hostile, sites and posters, by suppressing their true following. The Guardian has never given an explanation as to why they closed their old readers' comments section - I forget what it was called - in which readers could initiate threads, themselves. Axel

I just searched for my screen name on this via google and get 677 hits. Maybe you have child safe mode on google search. The search without site gives me 1 hit on "Planckian network" + nightlight, although that should be in several threads here. Bing and Yahoo return 2 UD hits on that combination. So, it may be that they have added some search penalty on general searches for UD. nightlight

First of all you can't assume that the Google slight is by design until you first meticulously define design and intelligence and we all agree to that definition. Before you even begin to explore the matter you need to determine what your null hypothesis is and it can't be "chance". Even after you do that there is no reason to infer that the absence of the site on Google is not just the result of a combination of chance and necessity. After all it's entirely possible that everything can be reduced to chance and necessity. When it comes to entities like Google we have no experience as to what design would look like our experience is limited to actual human design. And to top it all off we can't conclude that this is the result of conscious intent because no one has conclusively proven that there is such a thing a consciousness in the first place peace fifthmonarchyman

Don't blame Google. Just optimize the SEO. Look at the source code of behe.uncommondescent.com and uncommondescent.com. 'behe' subpage has Google analytics and track pagetrack view, so naturally, Google is going to put behe subpage on top. Nothing mysterious going on here. selvaRajan

I stopped using google a long time ago because it is essentially an apparatchik arm of the extreme left-wing statists. I won't use any google product or software. William J Murray

FE: While that could be a factor, it does not explain how the Behe sub-site is at the top. There is likely to be an ideological factor. KF kairosfocus

FYI, how i originally learned about your site was by going to behe.uncommondescent.com and saying I wonder what happens when you take out the behe in front of uncommondescent.com . In terms of how to fix it, you'd need to research SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It could be google handles SEO differently, and so the anti-ID stuff floats to the top that way, but it is surprising that the source site isn't even on the first page. By comparison if you look up the westboro baptist church on google (which you'd think would by more hated than ID) their official site is the first listing. I am not an SEO expert so I can't help you any further than that. fryether

Greetings everyone.
As an IT Professional, I am shocked that if you look up “uncommon descent” on google the only reference to the actual site is behe.uncommondescent.com
I thought it weird too. It's been at least a week since I noticed this. seventrees

Google is known to bury items that do not gel with a certain ideology they seem to represent. I'm not saying this is what is happening, but if it was happening I'd not be surprised. I'd abandoned Google once the privacy concerns were raised, and I'm never going back. TSErik

I could not access UD last night (Indonesian time). Was it somehow related to the problem raised in this post? paijo

SC: FE’s comment was released once I knew of it.
Thanks. I'm glad we're getting new visitors. I've probably left a few in the queue myself until I found them. I hope the mods approve some of the new members. Sal scordova

SC: FE's comment was released once I knew of it. I searched for Uncommon Descent using several search engines and found Google an outlier. Yahoo, Bing and Dogpile give very different patterns. Only Duckduckglo gives anywhere near so many objector sites in the opening page. Copernic, I need to check out further. Older searches like Lycos don't show UD. Altavista points back to Yahoo with hints they may have been bought out. Something definitely has gone wrong and as Google is so dominant, it is likely a case of censorship (again) . . . one's responsibility when one is dominant is very different from when one is just one of the pack. KF kairosfocus

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