Objections:

• It won’t work.  This is trivial for spambot authors to work around.  All that a bot needs to do is to make one post which will have a high probability of passing human review from someone who is not following the thread in which the post is made.  The old spammer trick of copying and pasting an earlier post in a long thread can be fully automated—as can a text spinner, to prevent catching that with a bot, too.
• It will result in overreporting of legitimate humans.  Most people are injudicious.  Most people will not use this only to report obvious spambot activity.  Many people will apply their own biases when reporting; and moderators are not always perfect in filtering that out.
  
  This always happens; but I think that it will be worse when those biases are focused on every new user’s first post, especially since people using this will also suffer confirmation bias when they are looking for something bad.  Use of this tool will bias the whole process to err toward the deletion of new users’ first posts.

Unfun fact that I have not hereto mentioned:  My own first post was trashed.  I am still not sure why.  There is a reason why I have oftentimes referred to “the first post in my post history”.  My actual first post on this forum was deleted almost immediately.

Given that experience, I know how discouraging it can be to a human with a Brand New account.  I don’t expect for it to discourage the spambot authors.

---

So, the unbanned copypasteress, who subsequently made a career of getting small copypasters banned, now steps up to protect the major active career plagiarist who is systematically spamming this forum with completely ripped-off posts.  I expected that—I saw it coming—though of course, I could not accuse someone of something that she had not yet done. 

Much of this discussion exemplifies a phenomenon that Lauda privately called “the enablers”.  Some enablers are cowards:  They will do the right thing when convenient, but they will never criticize or oppose popular people—let alone those with DT inclusions.  Of those who defend Ratimov on this thread, how many act from peer pressure?

Others run a common sort of reputational long con on this forum:  They build reputation playing police against smaller wrongdoing, then exploit that position to protect bigger wrongdoing.  If there is no honour among thieves, why not show virtue prosecuting pickpockets so as to promote highway robbery?


You hypocrite!  Ratimov is the one hereby not inclined to blame himself for his own wrongdoing, which is assuredly not a mistake.

Lauda бы назвала тебя хитрой.  I am not so gentle: I will call you хитровыебанной.

(I would ask Ratimov to translate, but he cannot:  He is a tool, and my tricks are superior to his tools.  O Google Translate, я тебя тыкал!)

Whereas I, who have hereby condemned Ratimov, assuredly have never had any self-interested grudge against him.  Indeed, I had nothing at all against him—before a few weeks ago, when I independently discovered something dirty in the Russian forum; you will be miserable when I disclose that publicly.  And hereby, I act on the evidence.

I condemn plagiarism.  Ratimov is a systematic, active, remorseless plagiarist who blames only others for his own wrongdoing.  Therefore, I condemn Ratimov.



Actually, I wasn’t really curious.  Just call me cynical.

https://loyce.club/archive/posts/5525/55250929.html
“Ратимов” = Ratimov

lovesmayfamilis’ bad-faith rules-lawyering should get short shrift!


Tsk, tsk.  Dear anonymous “clown troll”, you did such a good job reporting this.  Please, let us keep our language suitable to the cultural level of the audience! 

---

With due apologies to the gentleman who just started cursing at me under his breath.  I realized long ago that this forum is not a place for gentlemen.

Correction:  Ratimov did not assemble an article “from 5 sources”.  He copied and pasted the whole post from a single article (with some parts omitted).  It is far from the first time that he has done such things.

The list of “sources” at the end is misleading in many ways.  Including this.  There was only one “source”.  You have been misled.


Say what!?  Academic-style footnote sources are provided in papers that are “completely” the authors’.  That is what avoiding plagiarism means:  The work must be yours.  Of course, almost all serious work refers to others work, or builds on prior work.


Not even remotely credible.


He copied and pasted the whole post from the article.  Why are you talking about thesis-style footnotes?  You are making no sense whatsoever.

<snip>


Then you know nothing about translations.  (And I infer that you must know only one language.)

It is impossible to translate any nontrivial text word-for-word from such a language as Russian, with its highly complex and subtle grammar (or, say, German, with its moderately complex grammar, its difficult compounds, and its SOV word order—or...), into English.  The result would be comical gibberish.

Google Translate itself does not translate literally, word-for-word, as you imply.  If it did, then it would be totally useless.  It uses the latest advancements in natural language processing and AI.  It still makes many basic mistakes; and it chokes horribly on idioms that a competent human translator would translate in concept, possibly using some awkward circumlocutions if no analogous concept exists in the target language.

So certain is it that different translators will produce different results that in classical antiquity, the Jews used this as a “proof” that the Septuagint was translated under divine authority.  They claimed that 72 different rabbis each sat alone in a room, translated the Bible to Greek, and produced word-for-word identical results—therefore, God must have guided the translation!  If there were any proof that 72 different translators independently produced word-for-word identical results, or even that 2 translators produced identical results, then this would actually be a scientifically credible argument.  (Of course, there is no such proof.)

Do you wish to suggest that Ratimov and Google Translate are both guided by God in their translations?  


Really?  I spent little effort on identifying the orange-highlighted parts below; I could have pointed out more.

Anyway, your whole argument is patent nonsense to anyone who understands the art of translation, or even anyone who speaks more than one language.


Edited to add (of course):  Ratimov not only admits to using Google Translate:  He claims that his English is so poor, he uses Google Translate to write in English by himself (!).

Internal quotation slightly expanded:

Woah, dude, is o_e_l_e_o encouraging me to dox myself and others for merits?  Or suggesting that intelligent people use social graph leeching, communications-monitoring mass-surveillance sites like Tinder?    ;-)

No Tinder here, and no public proofs of confidential activities.  Nonetheless, this invokes a serious comment that I threw in here:


Intimate secrets.  Secret diaries, secret love-notes, — whispers in the ear across the distance when we are apart, so that we can always be together.

Such things will not exactly entice a typical woman (or a typical anybody) to memorize gpg command-line switches.  But if presented in a romantic, non-nerdy way, this will seduce her into Protonmail, or encrypted chat/voice/video apps, etc.

—And besides seduction, try fear, disgust, and a feeling of intimate violation.  Show her this video, starting just before the 10-minute mark:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden-video-interview


It is no joke.  I tightened up on opsec in my personal life, after I realized that the voyeuristic professional perverts at the NSA must have an outright pornographic view of years’ worth of my intimate moments that were NOT MEANT FOR SHARING.  The NSA’s dragnet mass-surveillance is tantamount to a U.S. government-internal version of pinkmeth.

My private life is not intended to be a Ciphersex show for NSA creeps.

This is a serious motive to use no-backdoor encrypted communications, for any decent person who has dignity and self-respect.

Explain it to your date that way, and not in terms of your key size.  Don’t show each other your bits until you get encrypted with her.

Cross-reference to an example for the below:  This is proper attribution of a copied-pasted post.

---

Thanks for your responses, theymos and mprep!  My inquiry about Rule 27 is well-answered.

Now quoting slightly out of context what theymos, mprep, and I each said about Rule 27, but now in application to Rule 33:




Is the excuse, “but he provided a ‘source’ link!  (somehow—sort of—without really identifying authorship)” not rules-lawyering at its worst?


^^^ Rules-lawyering, Exhibit 0.  From that thread alone, I could provide many more examples—some of them from people who have no personal animosity towards me.

---

In the context of the Ratimov case, and the types of so-called “source” that Ratimov has provided in multiple copied-pasted posts, what you are saying means that plagiarism is acceptable on this forum, and is not against the rules.  That would be shocking to me—and, I have no doubt, to many other veteran users, who accord to this forum a respect undeserved by the many forums that are cesspools of plagiarism.

This post confuses plagiarism with copyright, which is one of my pet peeves; but at least theymos’ heart was in the right place here:
Note for theymos:  The complete works of Shakespeare are in the public domain.  No copyright, no licence!  Nonetheless, it is unacceptable to plagiarise Shakespeare.  Plagiarism and copyright are different issues.  I am not the only one who says so.

What if I were to find an old essay posted by theymos on some obscure website, copy and paste it into a topic OP on this forum, and just toss in an anonymous “source” link at the bottom—without prominently identifying the author by name (“by theymos”), or even naming the author at all?  Would theymos consider his own desire for attribution to be satisfied?

---

I think that too many people are applying a rules-lawyer’s logically fallacious, absolutely mechanistic misinterpretation of the exact letter of what theymos said here:


My own reading is that theymos was expressing what he himself deems to be a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.  That theymos statement has been twisted into a loophole to avoid crediting authors by name—and even to avoid making it clear to readers the person who copied the article is not the author!  Whereas in substance, proper credit for authorship is the most important part.  The link is secondary to that, although I fully agree that a link should be provided when a webpage is the principal original source.

The interpretation of that statement being argued by others not only violates academic and publishing industry standards:  It defies common sense.  I would be aghast if theymos were to say that it is in the spirit of the rules.

---

On the other hand:  If it be acceptable to copy and paste the text of a whole post with a vague link at the bottom, and no prominently displayed authorial byline, then the word “plagiarism” would need to be removed from the rules.  (And its equivalents, in all languages.)

The word “plagiarism” has a meaning.  That meaning is open to some measure of debate; indeed, it is the subject of much debate in academia and in the writing professions.  However, the forum should not make up a new definition of “plagiarism” which flatly contradicts what any intelligent person would expect it to mean.

In the abstract, plagiarism is wrong because it means stealing credit for another’s creative original work.  In every question about plagiarism, start by asking:  Does X tend to cause readers to give credit to the wrong person?  —Does Y show an intent to make the alleged plagiarist look smarter, wiser, or more knowledgeable than he really is, by stealing another’s glory?


That is my own definition.  As I have demonstrated on several different threads in the past month or so, I can also cite numerous sources backing the essential substance of my opinion, from academic integrity resources to publishing industry best practices.

N.b. that inadequate attribution may not be plagiarism per se, if done in ignorance or clumsiness.  In that case, the user should be educated about how properly to provide credit.  For a post that substantially consists of a single copy and paste, that means an authorial byline, prominently displayed at the top.  —With the author’s name, not merely an unexplained, unidentified link.

Note to avoid nitpicks by rules-lawyers:  I think that a link may sometimes suffice for short quotes, if the site itself is being credited as the author; particularly, it may make sense for some Web publications.  But generally, unless the link is to the author’s own vanity domain or to a publication substantially run by the author, a link in itself does not really identify who the author is.

I am not trying to get people in trouble for honest mistakes, or occasional minor sloppiness with the author= field in <quote> blocks, or even things that may be honest mistakes!  I myself have sometimes PMed users a polite tip about how properly to cite copied material, with a warning that they may be accused of plagiarism.  I only take a hard line when it is very clear to me that a user has dishonest intentions—that he wants to trick others into believing that he himself is the author.

If a user is aware of this issue, then making copied-pasted posts in a manner that would cause a reasonable person to misidentify authorship is plagiarism.  By definition.  And if it is not against the forum rules, then the forum rules allow plagiarism.

---

Furthermore, as to a related issue about which I have been intending to inquire for awhile:

I suggest that the rule should distinguish between plagiarism, and insubstantive copies of one-liner shitposts, etc.  I agree that both should be against the rules; but they are distinct violations.  If e.g. a user copies and pastes a post in an ANN thread that says only, “hello good luck with project”, then it is not “plagiarism”, for there is no original substance to plagiarise.

To call that “plagiarism” trivialises the severity of actual plagiarism.  I suggest that the usual penalty for such no-value copies of no-value posts should be proportionately much lower than the usual penalty for plagiarism:  Temp ban for first offence, versus permaban.

---

Whereupon I request a review of Rule 33:  Either the word “plagiarism” should be removed, or it needs to be clarified that simply tossing in a link somewhere does not suffice to avoid plagiarism; and some distinction should be made between plagiarism, and no-value unattributed copying.

I do not want to suggest any rigid format for citations and attributions of authorship in all cases.  I don’t think that such a thing should be made a rule, as such.  However, to show how one should act in the spirit of the rules, I have created a new topic with a copied-pasted OP, as my example of optimal attribution of authorship in some types of circumstances.

---

Thanks again for your attention to this matter.  I hope that this discussion will result in constructive actions both to prevent the evasive gaming of the plagiarism rule, and to help increase awareness of the issues by people who may simply be clumsy in attribution.

Why is witcher_sense defending Ratimov hereby?


Perhaps Ratimov can provide us with a translation of that!  Of course, he will need to use Google Translate, because:


witcher_sense now loves Google Translate so much, he thinks that it’s fine to spam the English section with Google translations of plagiarised Russian articles? 

---

Good thread.  I recommend that everybody following this case should read it, using Google Translate if necessary.


Whereas Ratimov seems not to be even capable of doing translations.  He is only using Google Translate, and posting the results.  —At least, that is what he now claims, in substantial effect.  Anyone who claims that he cannot write in English without Google-translating his own words from Russian, and effectually claims not even to know the meaning of the pronoun “I”, obviously cannot make any translations involving the English language—not to English, and not from English!  Right?


For my part, I have always had the highest respect for people from Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern bloc regions.  It is a shame when a few bad apples make the whole barrel smell rotten to some Westerners with limited viewpoints.


I have spoken privately to users here who are from countries so poor, they have family members who make the equivalent of about USD 30 $ per month at full-time jobs.  (No joke.  Real “third world” places.)  For them, even a low-end bounty or signature campaign means significant money.  The users to whom I spoke did the best that they could honestly:  No cheating, no spamming, no shitposting—just wearing a paid signature while trying to improve their knowledge of Bitcoin, and otherwise to engage with the forum community.

They had to compete against the flood of spammers who would do anything for a merit; and they risked false accusations of cheating in campaigns, simply due to being from very problematic regions.  They found that to be quite discouraging.

Yes, true stories.  Blended together with some insubstantive details changed, to protect the privacy of people who confided in me.

Hereby, we have the same problem:  A generalized version of Gresham’s Law.  The bad displaces the good.  The result is a state of affairs in which the honest, the truthful ones, are considered the more stupid.  It would end in the belief that it is better to have a share in the wrongdoing, than to stand by with empty hands or allow oneself to be wronged.

As I indicated earlier in this thread, I take as a personal affront when, after all of the time and effort I have invested in making original high-quality posts that people merited, I see Ratimov making a forum career of huge copy-paste OPs.  Why the hell did I ever waste my time with this forum!?

Or:  🤔 Why don’t I do the same thing?  Surely, if I were to make a habit of that, I would soon reach my 3000th merit!

—And why don’t I get paid for it?  🤑  It is by now a sort of an open secret here that I am poor.  Isn’t that an unlimited justification, plus a mark of sainthood? 

—And why not others?  Why doesn’t johnnyUA do the same as Ratimov?  Why doesn’t everybody?

Surely, that would make the forum a successful community; and it would do much to advance Bitcoin.

Note to the moderators:  To support Meta discussions (0) with mprep and others about plagiarism, and (1) about the Ratimov case, I make this post to exemplify proper attribution for a post that is wholly copied and pasted.

In my opinion, such a copied-pasted post as this should generally be considered to be spam, and also a violation of Rule #1.  It would be just like many of Ratimov’s threads—except that my post hereby is properly attributed, not plagiarised.  (If forum policy disagrees with my opinion, then of course, I may start doing this every day—ten times per day!—for the merits, possibly with a paid signature.  Why not?)

I do think that this post would violate forum rules against spam and low-value posts, if not for the salutary lessons hereby provided to the community through my leadership by example, and with the following note:

Public Service Announcement:  I more or less agree with the following article, and I think that it is a good article.  Ordinarily, if I wished to raise it for a forum discussion, I would make an OP with a properly attributed excerpt of the article, provide a link to the original, and add my own original commentary (clearly shown as my own words, distinguished from the article’s words).  That would not be spam; and it would not be a low-value post.  Be guided accordingly.

Local rules:  My usual self-moderation rules, with the added provisos that (0) Ratimov is banned from this topic, and (1) this topic is about the following article.  Go to Meta for discussions of plagiarism, proper attribution, spam, low-value posts, the forum’s rules, and the Ratimov case.  Posts discussing those issues here may be deleted as off-topic.  Here, discuss only the article and its subject matter.

---

We Must Solve Bitcoin’s Custody UX Problem

By Nick Neuman
December 7, 2020
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/we-must-solve-bitcoins-custody-ux-problem


Twelve years is the blink of an eye in historical terms, but it’s an eternity in tech. Just look at the cellphone, which went from niche accessory to absolute necessity in under a decade. Still, new technologies don’t always soar immediately: it took a quarter of a century for the humble washing machine to reach even half of U.S. homes.

This Halloween marked the twelfth anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper. In that short time, Bitcoin has transformed the way we think about money, but it’s still a long way from mass adoption. As a result, we need to ask some uncomfortable questions about what’s holding Bitcoin back.

What’s The Problem? The UX

In my mind, there’s no question that user experience (UX) has always been the biggest single obstacle to Bitcoin adoption. But not in the way you might think.

UX is a slippery term: it means different things to different people in different contexts. With Bitcoin, for example, UX extends far beyond the intuitiveness of individual exchanges or wallets. Since we’re talking about people’s investment, security is a — the — crucial consideration in any discussion about UX.

Bitcoin suffers from a usability problem that can’t simply be fixed with a new interface. This isn’t a technical error but a human one: the assumption that it’s safer to store coins with an exchange instead of keeping custody yourself. This can’t be fixed with a new user interface (UI); it requires a revolution in the way we think about Bitcoin security.

In the early days, poor UX didn’t really matter, since Bitcoin platforms were mostly used by traders and speculators who had the technical chops to navigate complexity. But when ordinary people started dabbling in Bitcoin, a host of exchanges and trading platforms focused their attention on developing “consumer-grade” user experiences. Ironically, this was the moment where Bitcoin’s UX problems really began.

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. The world’s first highly-publicized hack, of Mt. Gox in 2014, saw 24,000 people lose everything. But in the six years since, we’ve continued in the wrong direction on security. There’s not enough space here to detail the number of exchanges that have gone bust, been hacked or, like OKEx in October, lost access to customers’ keys after the single employee in charge of them was detained by law enforcement.

In the first half of 2020 alone, blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace found that investors lost $1.4 billion worth of crypto, much of it from exchanges that suffered hacks or, sickeningly, committed fraud against their customers. What’s going wrong?

Instead of making it easy and intuitive for everyone to hold their own keys, the industry has focused on delivering a consumer-friendly, “full service” experiences where third parties control every aspect — including key custody.

That may be a good starting point for the first-time user, since it stops them from making very basic security errors. But it still leaves you vulnerable to a range of threats, both from within and outside the exchange.

In spite of these well-publicized catastrophes, our industry hasn’t yet turned its attention to developing a standard solution to this gaping, fundamental security flaw. In large part, that’s because it suits platforms to have their customers keep their coins on-exchange.

Making Security Simple

Early Bitcoin UX efforts focused on superficial issues and dismissed the deep problem of helping users own their private keys. They figured that solid UX for users to control their keys was an unwinnable battle and took it off the table.

While that’s understandable, I believe it was a mistake. The whole ethos of Bitcoin is built on the idea of empowerment: to be your own bank, to control your own savings and to take charge of your own financial destiny. But in trying to make UX more seamless for non-technical customers, exchanges and custodial wallets have (perhaps unwittingly) discouraged self-sovereignty and opened the door for third-party risk. And it’s hard to imagine a worse experience than losing every satoshi of your investment.

Approachable end-user control of private keys is the holy grail of solving bitcoin UX, and it’s one that the industry has largely sidestepped.

So, while many new Bitcoin users face a steep learning curve, they are not learning that old security models don’t apply. If you lose your keys, for example, you can’t just hit “password reset” — your coins are gone forever. This, in part, explains why exchanges are so keen to own the whole experience, including custody.

But sacrificing security in favor of ease-of-use is a false choice. We should not underestimate the challenge, both from a technical point of view and in terms of design. But it’s quite possible to make it easy for users to keep custody of their keys, combining high security with great UX. The harder task is educating the coin-buying public about why self-custody is so important. But it’s well within our industry’s capabilities, if we only give it the priority it demands.

In the next ten years, Bitcoin will take one of two trajectories: either a cellphone-style surge in adoption or the slow rise of the washing machine. It all depends on how quickly we solve Bitcoin’s biggest UX challenge: making self-custody simple.

This is a guest post by Nick Neuman. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine (or nullius).

Regardless of how some “people” defend the indefensible, I doubt that a reputable signature campaign manager will want to waste his client’s money paying a plagiarist to spam the forum with Google translations of articles written by others. 


It’s okay, just another idiot-troll meriting a clown-troll.  You are wasting your time.  It’s generally not even worth attention to answer.

---

Ratimov is misdirecting with an attempt to divert an English-speaking audience into a debate over the finer points of Russian grammar, by exploiting a loophole in Google’s low-quality, error-ridden automated translation.

Ironically, he thereby implicitly admits that his Google-translated shitposts are inaccurate, “zero or low value, pointless or uninteresting posts or threads” that violate Rule #1.  Anyway, let’s cut the nonsense.

Ratimov claims to provide translations.  Only an outright scammer would make a name for himself by providing translations to a target language in which he lacks even the most basic facility.  As an English speaker myself, I think that the English-speaking audience will agree with me that if Ratimov did not notice the meaning and implication of the first-person pronoun “I” in the very first sentence of his post—in one of only two sentences that he himself wrote in the post, then he should not even be engaging regularly in English-language discussions—let alone offering any translations to English!

Whereupon:

• For someone who not only posts regularly in the English forum, but offers translations to English, it is incredible for him to allege that he just didn’t realize that the sentence he prepended to a copy-paste used the word “I” in a way that claims ownership of the article.  It is an excuse tantamount to, “The dog ate my homework.”  By far, the most probable explanation is that he is lying and making up a cover story, now that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
• The evidence in that initial, added sentence, “In this article I would like to touch upon...” dovetails with the evidence that he (a) he provided no byline naming the author of the article, and (b) he deceitfully buried the link to the original in tiny text, amidst an anonymous, unexplained, misrepresented list of links at the bottom.
  
  If he had honestly represented the authorship of the post by naming the author prominently at the top (or even at all), then it may be arguably just a little bit plausible that he got confused with a contradictory English preface.  Not so, when each and every indicium of authorship is that Ratimov wrote the post.

We need not reach the questions (plural) of whether he really used Google Translate to create that sentence, and if so, what he really typed into it:  The questions are nugatory, whereas anyone who is regularly active in the English forum could damn well see what the output meant.

For the record:  I would not apply the same argument to someone who exclusively, or almost exclusively posted in a Local forum.  But then, such a person would not be spamming the English-language forums with Google translations of articles written by other people; thus, the question would not arise.

---

That does not only strain credulity:  It shatters it into a thousand pieces, stomps on it, then douses it with petrol and lights it ablaze.

Credulity is well and truly dead here.  (Unless you also seriously believe that confirmed science proves that you should short Bitcoin at high leverage.)

Furthermore, certainty beyond a reasonable doubt is not hereby the proper standard of evidence.  I argue that these forum issues should be judged on the preponderance of the evidence.  (That said, the doubt about the intent of mashing an unlabelled source link into a tiny list of links is unreasonable doubt.)

At this juncture, I should also point out that as I was unaware when I entered this thread, Ratimov has previously had plagiarism accusations for copied-pasted posts with “source” links at the end.  For example:

Re: Report plagiarism (copy/paste) here. Mods: please give temp or permban as needed

The referenced post:

Note:  The “source” link thereby is in normal-sized text.  The post is still at best improperly attributed; and if done not in ignorance of the issue, it is plagiarism.

Overall, the weight of the evidence is that Ratimov hides the foreign-language “source” link to evade the accusations that are brought when people can actually find the “source”.

---

The following is only Meta issue insofar as it shows that Ratimov is acting in bad faith from start to finish.  If he abuses his current DT1 status in a pitiable attempt to intimidate and retaliate against me, it goes to character; and it tends to demonstrate that he is lying about his intentions with his plagiarized post.

It is otherwise a Reputation issue; but it is too stupid for me to feel like bothering with a Reputation thread over it right now.  Retaliation for negative trust feedback that will be of business/trade-risk interest to signature campaign managers who don’t want to be cheated into paying for Google-translated plagiarism?  LOL.  Srsly?



Well, there I go again, using my “main account” to stand up for right over wrong. 

Why not?  It is a clear-cut textbook example of definitional plagiarism.

I think it mostly fits the description of “Source-based Plagiarism” in the Turnitin.com Plagiarism Spectrum 2.0 (infographic PDF), though what Ratimov did is worse insofar as he clearly made himself appear to be the original author of the text.  Really, what Ratimov did is just old-fashioned plagiarism with some duplicitous double-talk about “sources”.


I don’t think that everything on that spectrum is applicable outside academia—in particular, “self-plagiarism”.  If e.g. a forum member were habitually to copy and paste his own articles into the forum from his own website, then it would not be “plagiarism” in any meaningful sense here; but it may be spamming, which is also against the rules.  Anyway, some of the concepts on that infographic are certainly useful in this discussion.

---

FTFY:

Why at the end?  That is inverted thinking, especially because the forum’s format gives a byline for the author of every post:  The poster’s username.  That is up top.

In general (ignoring weird edge cases), the only acceptable way properly to give credit for lengthy copied material is to present the actual author’s name (and, if applicable, the source hyperlink) on a byline prominently displayed at the top of the copied material.  Cf. the forum’s <quote> block format, which attributes a quotation at the top thereof.

Anything else here is either improper attribution, or plagiarism, depending on whether the person doing it has made a good-faith effort to cite the source.  Last month, I quoted an academic writing resource’s explanation of the difference.  Somebody who appears to have tried to cite the source, and made a mistake, deserves guidance (if appropriate, via a polite PM).  Somebody who prefaces the copied material with text unavoidably implying authorship thereof, and buries a source link in a tiny-text list of links at the bottom, has clearly committed plagiarism.

---

nutildah’s illogical hairsplitting and rules-lawyering over a mechanistic parsing of a quote demonstrates empirically that using LSD can permanently compromise one’s powers of judgment and reasoning.  PSA:  It is an irreparably damaging “experience” that young people should avoid!

Pro tip nutildah:  Twisting theymos’ words to cover burying a tiny “source” link in the middle of a misrepresented list of “source” links, at the very bottom of a copied-pasted post that (a) did not name the original author, (b) dishonestly claimed Ratimov’s authorship (“In this article I...”), shows only that you yourself are mentally deranged and/or malicious and dishonest.  All of the above, I think.

---

nutildah, your obsessive, unjustified cryptohunter-style attack on Lauda is also quite revealing.  CH, it is such a nice secret fan club you have here!  Now, watch me pick them apart.

• What Lauda did was orders of magnitude less-bad in scope and in level of dishonesty than Ratimov’s plagiarism.  nutildah perversely inverts the truth in comparing the two.  Lauda never intentionally ripped off whole posts from foreign language articles, laundered them through an automated translator, and then posted them as new topic OPs prefaced by a line dishonestly claiming authorship (“In this article I would like to touch upon...”).
• If Lauda had done that, and/or if Lauda had reacted to the plagiarism accusation the same way as Ratimov has, then I would have eaten kitty-chops, extra rare, with a nice Chianti.
  
  
  Quote from: nullius on May 23, 2020, 12:58:54 AM
  I was about ready to dine on feline fillet; and I grilled Lauda about this in private.
  Quote from: nullius on November 23, 2020, 01:03:10 AM
  
  A bank’s KYC/AML compliance officer once tried to test me.  I was critical of his discourteous intrusion.
  
  She did not, because she was an honest person.  Nobody is perfect.  At the baseline, honest people who are caught in some past wrongdoing (usually due to sincere mistakes) do not attack the accuser, declare that wrongdoing is right in principle, and remorselessly insist that they will keep doing wrong.
  
  
  Quote from: Lauda on May 21, 2020, 11:55:42 AM
  Quote from: bitcoinchan on May 20, 2020, 08:25:18 PM

  Username: Lauda
  Profile link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=101872
  

  Thank you for reporting these.
  
  In the circumstance, Lauda did the best to make right that she could do without a time machine.  In private, that was also the first time that, among other things, I heard her mention the idea of requesting a self-ban—in the manner of kitty seppuku.  I had to talk her out of it.  For obvious reasons, I did not want to disclose that publicly at the time when all of Lauda’s enemies were demanding that she be banned.
  
  
  🌸🌸🌸🀥🌸🌸🌸
  the way of the warrior
  if your friend self-eviscerates
  beheading is friendship
  
  Base image source: The Gist of Japan: The Islands, Their People, And Missions, Rev. R. B. Peery, A.M., Ph.D. (1897), p. 85,
  via Wikimedia Commons.
  
  I don’t think that that had anything to do with what happened in October.  Her activity did drop off a cliff after May; but from my view of the situation, I think that it was probably a coincidence—probably.  Anyway, nutildah and cryptohunter can now both celebrate together that “the banned plagiarist Lauda” is gone!
• If Lauda had done anything like this anytime recently, I would have seen it differently.  Ratimov is committing extreme plagiarism much worse than anything that Lauda ever did, and he is doing it right now.

That is reality.  If you don’t like it, o nutty nutildah, take another hit of acid to make it go away. 

---

P.S., protip for nutildah and suchmoon:  Pretending to ignore me renders you (even more) impotent as a debate opponent.  It also makes you look silly to the audience, when you reasonably need to respond to something that I said.  Awkward!  Please keep doing it.  Thanks.

I request that Rule #27 be reviewed, and potentially clarified with a note; but I am ambivalent about asking for it to be changed in substance.


The problem with broadening that rule to prohibit all posting of machine-translated content is that the forum’s main language is English, and its primary administrative language is English.  Translated content from Local boards must oftentimes be posted in Global, for reasons ranging from scam investigations, to the Meta discussion of Local staff and Local merit sources, to—well, I can think of many valid reasons for this; and the reasons are not restricted to any particular board.  And sometimes, it may even be reasonably necessary to post a translation of an entire article or post in Global.  Overall, it would be unreasonable to expect that all such translations be done by a human.

Furthermore, as a practical matter, there are limited staff with the necessary language competency for moderating each Local board.  If the posting of automated translations in Local were allowed, then it is foreseeable that the problems thus created would be uncontrollable.  Whereas Global has much more manpower.

IIUC, the rule must stop Local users from sigspamming and/or inappropriately multiposting by such means, and/or stop inauthentic users, especially spammers, from using automated translation tools to attempt posting in boards where they actually know nothing about the local language.  The potential problems with automated translation in Global are subtly but significantly different.

The question raised in the Ratimov case is already covered by the plagiarism rule.  However, it may be wise to add a note to #27 clarifying that (a) it does not apply in Global, and (b) Rule #33 and its note prohibit using machine translation to plagiarize anywhere, whether in a Local board or not.

It may also be wise to somewhat broaden Rule #27 to restrict certain types of posts made in Global with automated translation.  However, it would be difficult to do this in a way that is (a) concise (= shorter than a typical nullius post), (b) fully fair, without “gotchas”, to people who have a legitimate reason to use automated translation, and (c) resistant to hairsplitting and rules-lawyering by those who don’t.  I invite discussion of how best the objectives of the forum rules could be achieved on this point.

In the spirit of the rules, so as for the letter thereof.

Thanks.

---

It is obviously plagiarism.  Not only “copy and paste”, but a definitive example of extreme plagiarism by a remorseless, habituated plagiarist whose response is to deny that he is doing anything whatsoever wrong, to insist that he will continue to do it, and to counterattack ad hominem against anybody who accuses him.


What Ratimov is doing is indefensible.  ← Cover up the name, and you will see that a Newbie account doing the same thing would be instantly permabanned—depending on its post history, perhaps even nuked.  Anybody who defends it is untrustworthy and has untrustworthy judgment.  I have trust-excluded people for much less; and I have I even red-tagged cryptohunter for much less, when it comes to cheap rationalizations of plagiarism.

Internal quotation fixed so as to make mdayonliner’s meaning clear:

It is not irrelevant.  As I myself said before mdayonliner raised this issue, in the internal quotation:

---

Now, don’t you feel cheated that you sent merit to Ratimov for a rip-off Google Translate copy of another author’s work?

By the way, I know that there are people here, including myself, who do draft original content on this forum—including in “laying out historical information”.  Ratimov’s plagiarism cheapens their (our) work.

---

Definitional plagiarism is plagiarism.


Nonsense.  A buried, unlabelled reference at the bottom of a long post which begins with an explicit claim of this being Ratimov’s article—say what!?


Wrong.  With “this degree of non-original wording” in an academic thesis (!), i.e. all but the first two sentences (!!), the plagiarist would be expelled from university and permanently blacklisted from admissions.  Furthermore, any degrees previously awarded may be retroactively stripped, depending on the circumstance.

I almost raised this exact rule in the Ratimov thread.  However, #27 prohibits posting automated translations “in Local boards”—not in Global.

Given how badly some users (including several untrustworthy DTs) are hairsplitting and rules-lawyering, I decided not to bring it up.

Anyway, I replied hereby to hilarious; and I should think that hilarious does not need more than one rule to cover Ratimov’s case.  After all, hilarious is so very strongly opposed to plagiarism that he was the one who suggested the explicit anti-plagiarism rule to mprep.


There is also other staff precedent for banning plagiarists much earlier.

---

I don’t think that there is anything even the least bit questionable here.  And as you well know, theymos despises plagiarism!

PR for the Kidnaproot softfork upgrade:


#36 redoubles #18.  At the current rate of original authorship of new excuses, there will be at least a score more before the morrow.

Or perhaps Ratimov and his supporters need their own bingo card.

What about running a foreign-language article through Google Translate to English, prepending it with an explicit claim of your own authorship (“In this article I would like to touch upon...”), burying a link to the foreign-language original in the middle of a list of 7 links in <size=8pt> text at the bottom, insisting that all but “maybe 10%” of the forum is copied and pasted from elsewhere, and attacking everybody who accuses you of plagiarism?

---

Google Translate of articles written in a different language must be the worst “text-spinner” yet invented.  It must be generally quite difficult to catch.  I wonder how much of that is actually happening.

Good catch, and a very important point.  I am not sure how I missed that.

• If you republish a text written by another person,^* it is critical to put the author’s byline up top, in a prominent position!
• Ratimov flat-out lied about the authorship of the post.
  
  Quote from: nullius on December 08, 2020, 06:00:31 AM
  Quote from: Ratimov on December 03, 2020, 01:33:06 PM

  In this article I would like to touch upon such a theme as online privacy. As we know, now is the period of a pandemic, and it is at this time that rights and freedoms are being infringed, including on the Internet.  [—text fully copied from a Google translation of an article written by Andrew Askamov—]

Now, who will give me credit for my being the first to mention on this thread the most important part, the author’s name, which everybody else has ignored?  Hah.

* Assuming arguendo that this is allowed by forum rules as an OP.  I don’t think it is, generally; though there are some nuances in the rules here, IIUC.


That, too.  In addition to hiding the actual source.

Reserved for the purpose explained in OP.

Reserved for the purpose explained in OP.

I hate plagiarism.

Because I hate plagiarism, I am distraught that the forum community seems to be collectively ignorant of what plagiarism actually is, why it is bad, and what harm it does.  People here call non-plagiarism “plagiarism”, as in the case of RegulusHR—whom I would have issued a 7-day temp ban on first offence for a copied and pasted one-liner, zero-substance shitpost, but not permabanned for “plagiarism”.  And some so-called “people” absurdly deny that definitional examplars of plagiarism are plagiarism, as in the case of Ratimov.

Because I also hate conceited ignorance, I will now disclose the following:

I have done something that many of the “people” here would call “plagiarism”.  I have done it repeatedly—occasionally—for years.  I continue to do it—occasionally.

What I have never done, and will never do, is this—
—to the contrary!

Fear not:  The sesquipedalian pearls which I have a bad habit of casting hereabouts are my own.  I have too big an ego to steal others’ originality, instead of being original myself.  I oft spend considerable time and effort crafting a Nullian “artistic” post, all for the sheer joy of being the genuine, original, one and only me.

I don’t doubt that some of those who hate me must have wasted their time trawling my post history in search of plagiarism.  I do not think that they can ever find whereof I hereby speak.  It is a puzzle, a literary cryptogram, a secret message hidden in plain sight for a purpose that I deem to be an ethical imperative.

It will not be found in any plagiarism detection database; and I would be very surprised if anybody could ever figure it out with a search engine.

A university professor applying the methods of textual criticism could discover it.  Maybe.


Thereby, I mostly referred to puns, to subtle allusions, and otherwise to “hidden meanings” which do not directly invoke others’ writings.  —Mostly.

---

Some considerable time ago, I OTS timestamped some PGP-signed evidence.  I will hereby reserve post #2 for that, just in case I ever decide to reveal it; and I will reserve post #3 for additional evidence.

The posts will probably stay as “reserved”.  Probably.  If I walk into a police station, protest that the cops should not let “people” get away with actual kidnapping murder, and then tell them that they will never find the bodies that I did not “murder”, then I will probably leave it at that.

This hereby is, inter alia, my expression of profound contempt for remorseless plagiarists, and for all who defend them.  I will probably not reply here, unless someone says something interesting.

My jaw just dropped:  Is this person a DT1 and a merit source!?  —Ratimov, have you no shame?

Disgusting.

Plagiarism has always been unacceptable here.  theymos has generally expressed that he despises plagiarism, ever since the days when Satoshi was still here:


This latter post confuses plagiarism with copyright, which is one of my pet peeves; but at least theymos’ heart was in the right place there.

---

Nonsense.  On the face of your English-language post, it would require magical psychic powers to discern that you had posted a Google translation of Russian-language link #3 of 7 in your so-called “sources” list.

Your “references” to “sources” were only a cover-up to hide the source and dishonestly deny credit to the author.  You had only one source, which you totally ripped off and misrepresented as if it were your own original work.  ‘Kidnapped’, per the Latin etymology of the word “plagiarism”.

I observe that you did not even mention the name of the actual author.  The author’s name is Andrew Asmakov.  I am thus far the only one to have identified the author by name.  The author of the article—the one who deserves the credit for it!


It is a gross violation of forum rules.  One of the two worst plagiarisms that I have yet seen here, as I said.


Your despicable response is the very worst part of this.

You act with full intentions.  You are remorseless.  You blame anybody who accuses you.

What a contrast to this (for much less extensive bad posts that had occurred five years before, had never been repeated, and which I actually believe to have been unintentional):