Back in the 1990s one of the bigger stories I covered concerned an outfit called TotalNews.

TotalNews tried to make a living for itself by putting its trade dress around others' news stories, even covering the original ads with its own. After a legal fight it backed off, but it did not disappear.

Fast-forward nearly a decade. Since getting access to an RSS feed I've seen a lot of links from something called BigNewsNetwork. Here's one. It looks like a story from Israel, a panel complaining about regulators.

Now, right-click to look at the story's properties (or, if you have Firefox, click this frame and show only this frame in the subsequent menu). What you will see is the original story, with BigNews' banner (and its URL) stripped-out.

Here it is again, a Boston Globe story, from Dialog Newsedge, about Xcelis (something we covered yesterday). Strip out the banner and it's a story from America's Network.

Unlike TotalNews, BigNews doesn't strip out its victims ads. It merely hides their URL and sticks a banner on top of the page. Go to BigNews' about page, meanwhile, and you'll find a company incorporated in Bahrain and based in Sydney, Australia.

Look at their breaking news page again. It's nothing but links. What are these folks really doing, other than writing RSS code and sending e-mail, to justify having their banner on top of these stories? Are they really that different from TotalNews?

Well, yes, they are. They're in Bahrain.