[dang]

We've banned that site and changed the URL above to the article it ripped off and didn't link to, which is like 95th percentile blogspam shamelessness. In this case they even lifted the title as well. That clears 99.

Submitted URL was https://thehackposts.com/news/greenlands-ice-sheet-is-releas....

By the way, for anyone interested, an easy way to bust these is simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it. If there's a more original source, it will probably come up:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22It+is+a+region+that+conta...

Sometimes I have to do this a few times before hitting the jackpot, but in my experience: if content looks copied, it probably is.

[perihelions]

"simply to pick a likely-unique string from the article you suspect of being a ripoff and google it with quotes around it"

There's also a subtype that deliberately circumvents this trick. There is a type of ad fraudster that rips off of, e.g. native German-speaking writers, runs their work through machine translation, and publishes the English output as original.

I encountered several examples on some technical subs on Reddit (not yet on HN). It took a disproportionate amount of effort to unmask even one -- the method that ended up succeeding was to guess which technical terms could be idempotent under translation, and (&&) some together until the result set is small enough. (It's harder to reverse translate, because unless you're an expert translator, you probably don't know what the source language was).

I've only seen a handful of these, but because of how difficult it is to detect, I'd speculate there could be a sizeable population in the wild. The writing is technically correct and non-suspicious, because it's written by a human expert in another language. It strongly resists reverse Google searches. And it resists social unmasking, because social groups who speak different languages tend to have distance between them.

It's a clever evil.

[dang]

Excellent point. Links would be interesting if you happen to have any.

[perihelions]

I very briefly skimmed Reddit for examples. This one is /r/physics' 4th-most-upvoted post from this week, and hasn't been detected yet. It algorithmically substitutes random words for their synonyms (poorly); not the machine language translation I promised, but it's performing the same goal of resisting phrase matching.

    “We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” said Kazuhiro Hada of the

    “We knew that the first uninterrupted image of a black hole would be revolutionary,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the

Original is [0] and plagiarized is [1] (linked indirectly because the other URL is probably blacklisted on here, and possibly malicious).

This one was the cleanest of several examples I found*. I think the technique is widespread and broadly successful, based on my anecdotal experience. It's easy to find a diversity of examples in smaller-sized Reddit subs, the ones with less paranoid moderation and spam AI settings.

The machine translation examples are far harder to detect (to me); I'll update you if I discover one again in the future. The ones I found several years back appear to no longer exist.

[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/telescopes-unite-in-unpreceden...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/njbrec/data_from_1...

* (Because I could reliably identify the original document, and because the edit of a direct quotation from a named individual is an air-tight example of fraud).

[dang]

Fascinating—thank you!

Someone should try running the OP through machine translation into some other language and then back into English. I wonder if that would produce the effect you're describing. I might try this later if I remember!

Edit: I tried running the first few paragraphs through Google translate into German and back into English. I'll post the two version as replies to this comment. I also did this via Dutch (which unsurprisingly came back closer to English), Italian, and Russian.

It seems clear that you are right. The translations are good enough for blogspam and can be used to evade detection. For example,

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9C%5BMercury+concentr...

doesn't find the original. Other sentences I tried do get picked up by Google as references to the OP, but this can be circumvented. For example, this sentence from the English->German->English text gets picked up correctly:

https://www.google.com/search?q=The+discovery+is+worrying+si...

But the corresponding sentence from the English->Russian->English text does not:

https://www.google.com/search?q=This+finding+is+worrying+bec...

[dang]

Original paragraphs:

An ice sheet in the southwestern region of Greenland is releasing huge amounts of mercury into nearby rivers. The discovery is worrying as the toxic metal can accumulate in the marine animals that are a key dietary component for local Indigenous communities.

Mercury is a naturally occurring metal found in some rocks. As glaciers slowly flow downhill, they grind up the underlying rocks, potentially releasing mercury into their meltwater.

To find out whether this is occurring in Greenland, Jon Hawkings at Florida State University and his colleagues analysed meltwater flowing from the southwestern margin of the Greenland ice sheet.

Hawkings and his team completed two expeditions to Greenland in 2015 and 2018, collecting water samples from three meltwater rivers that receive substantial amounts of water from the Greenland ice sheet – up to 800 cubic metres per second. The samples were filtered to remove any sediment and kept safe from contamination. Then the researchers analysed the mercury concentration in each one.

“[Mercury concentrations in this region] are at least 10 times higher than in an average river,” says Hawkings. This means the meltwater is as rich in mercury as some highly polluted rivers – except in this case the mercury hasn’t been introduced into the water directly by humans. “Although this mercury isn’t introduced by humans, the ice sheet is melting much faster as a result of climate change,” says Hawkings.

[dang]

The same paragraphs machine-translated to German and then back to English:

An ice sheet in the southwestern region of Greenland releases huge amounts Quantities of mercury in nearby rivers. The discovery is worrying since the poisonous metal can accumulate in marine animals, which are a key Nutritional component for local indigenous communities.

Mercury is a naturally occurring metal found in some rocks. How Glaciers slowly flow downhill, they grind the rock below, possibly releasing mercury into their meltwater.

To find out if this happens in Greenland, Jon Hawkings at Florida State University and his colleagues analyzed flowing meltwater from the southwestern edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Hawkings and his team completed two expeditions to Greenland in 2015 and 2018 water samples from three meltwater rivers that receive significant amounts of water from the Greenland ice sheet - up up to 800 cubic meters per second. The samples were filtered to remove them any sediment and protected from contamination. Then the researchers analyzed the mercury concentration in each.

“[Mercury concentrations in this region] are at least ten times higher than an average river, ”says Hawkings. That is, the meltwater is as rich in mercury as some heavily polluted rivers - except here if the mercury was not brought directly into the water People. “Although this mercury is not introduced by humans, the ice is The sheet metal melts much faster due to climate change, ”says Hawkings.

[perihelions]

I suggest this version of the Greenland story, written by a chemist in fluent German:

https://www.spektrum.de/news/schwermetall-quecksilber-in-gro...

As far as I can tell, (1) there's absolutely nothing suspicious about the ML translation into English, and (2) there's no easy or reliable way to find the original article, given only the translation.

This bizarre query can find it (as the 3rd result). I don't think any "natural" query can.

https://www.google.com/search?q="42"+"2015"+"2018"+"Nature+G...

For convenience:

"Melting glaciers in southwest Greenland wash up to 42 tons of mercury per year into the surrounding rivers. That is around ten percent of the total mercury transported by rivers into the ocean worldwide, reports a team led by Jon R. Hawkings from Florida State University in Tallahassee. The poisonous heavy metal presumably comes from the rock at the bottom of the glacier, writes the working group in "Nature Geoscience". In 2015 and 2018, she examined three rivers that carry meltwater from the ice cap to the sea. The mercury concentrations there were at least ten times higher than in an average river - and comparable to waters that were heavily polluted by industry."

"In Greenland, however, humans are only indirectly involved. Measurements of meltwater from the top of the glacier show that the metal did not come from there. That would have indicated that it would have been deposited from the air and thus from technical sources. But the mercury probably comes from the rock under the glacier. Greenland's rock is gradually being crushed by the slowly creeping ice. This process also releases ore deposits, and thus metals such as mercury. However, people are not completely uninvolved. As a result of climate change, Greenland's ice is melting faster and faster, and more meltwater is getting under the glacier and leaching out the crushed ore."

"The finding shows that natural sources of heavy metal could also react sensitively to climate change, writes the Hawkings team. In addition, such sources are much more difficult to reduce than industrial emissions. Mercury is a particularly problematic environmental toxin because it is so toxic and primarily accumulates in the food chain in the form of methylmercury. The mercury from the glacier is particularly dangerous for indigenous communities, where fish and other marine animals make up a high proportion of the food. But in Germany too, fish contains considerable amounts of mercury compounds, primarily tuna, shark and eel. Small children and pregnant women should therefore avoid such fish."

[dang]

Indeed, it seems untraceable with any normal search.

[iab]

My bad - will be more careful next time.

[mef51]

Thanks for the change!