by Svelmoe
3. February 2009 17:19
I got a call from one of our clients today that the design of the website we had made for them, was being ripped off almost entirely by a Chinese based company.
And sure enough; entering the url of the offending website into my browser, it was all but an exact copy of the site I had made for the client.
Strangely enough, in the footer the rip-off artists had entered “copyright” and “all rights reserved” and nonsense like that, but had been so lazy that the HTML header which stated our company as developers was still present .... I mean, how obvious can you get?
This caused much amusement in-house and apparently our client wasn’t terrible worried as well, despite the site selling copied versions of some of their products.
The most fun part for us was however, when we afterwards discovered that the offending website was utilizing resources still located on the original site, such as the CSS files and stuff like that, and also the JavaScript file.
They had been so lazy they didn’t even move those files to their own site.
That meant we suddenly had a measure of control on that site via those resources.
There were many suggestions on which course of action to take. There were suggestions to redirect them to “Free Tibet” sites (it being a Chinese site it would likely have been blocked anyway), to interjecting various forms of scripts to bog down clients, or just redirecting to something plain disgusting or pornographic … or simply change the CSS to display all sorts of things on the website.
But common sense prevailed (it was work related after all, so I didn’t’ want to be too offensive) and I choose to redirect incoming traffic to http://bsa.org as it was the only anti-piracy organization I could think off at the moment.
I wonder how long it’ll take them to fix that, given how lazy they were to begin with. Guess I’ll have to check tomorrow to see. And if they haven’t changed tomorrow, it might be time to interject some snowflakes on the website instead.