User: I love trolls

Way OT, but is Slashdot Hypocritical?

On: Fred Moody Says Linux Worst Operating System Ever

Is Slashdot just a little hypocritical? They like to make a big noise about doubleclick, and yet they occasionally have doubleclick adverts embeded in iframes. Other times their cause of the moment is web bugs. Yes, those little 1*1 gifs that track your movements around a site.

Here is a search of slashdot showing the most recent doubleclick articles:
2 DoubleClick 'Web Bugs' On Porn, Medical Sites by jamie on Saturday July 01, @11:30AM EDT 255
2 FTC Asks To Regulate Privacy; Doubleclick Hires PR Team by michael on Sunday May 21, @10:16AM EDT 238
2 24/7 Sues DoubleClick Over Patent by Hemos on Saturday May 06, @04:58PM EDT 128
2 DoubleClick CEO on DMA Board by jamie on Monday April 10, @06:25PM EDT 3
2 DoubleClick DoublesBack by Hemos on Friday March 03, @08:55AM EDT 97
2 DoubleClick Goes On Offensive by jamie on Tuesday February 15, @09:25AM EDT 6
2 DoubleClick Taken to Court by Hemos on Friday January 28, @10:25AM EDT 323
2 DoubleClick DoubleCross by michael on Wednesday January 26, @01:10AM EDT 516
2 Doubleclick's Banner Ad Patent by CmdrTaco on Monday September 13, @07:51PM EDT 224
1 DoubleClick Workaround: IDcide by jamie on Wednesday March 22, @01:05PM EDT 246

I think this fairly solidly establishes the public image of slashdot, but what about underneath the covers?

From inside an iframe quite a while ago, and pretty much speaks for itself:
http://ad.doubleclick. net/adi/N815.slashdot/B18726;sz=468x60

And then this is what I saw today, and what caused this little outburst:
<NOSCRIPT>
<IMG SRC="http://images2.slashdot.org/Slashdot/pc.gif?/ index.shtml,965143990" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>
<IMG SRC="http://images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/ind ex.shtml,965143990" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1><BR>
</NOSCRIPT><BR>
A webbug! Oooohhh, they are so bad. They are evil. But we have nothing against using them ourselves!

Further down the same page, conveniently bypassing my ad-filter:
<NOSCRIPT>
<A HREF="http://images.slashdot.org/cgi-bin/adlog.pl? index,line0001en"><IMG SRC="http://images.slashdot.org/banner/line0001en. gif?965143990" WIDTH=468 HEIGHT=60 ALT="Click here."></A><BR>
</NOSCRIPT> This one is probably justified, depending on your opinion on adverts.

There is however more rubbish in the source, but since I normally have javascript poop switched off I don't have to suffer it. Here is a quick sample, but don't hesitate to view the source yourself:
document.write("<IMG SRC='http://images2.slashdot.org/Slashdot/pc.gif?/ index.shtml,");
document.write(tail);
document.write("' WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>");
document.write("<IMG SRC='http://images.slashdot.org/pagecount.gif?/ind ex.shtml,");
document.write(tail);
document.write("' WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1><BR>");

So the conclusion that Slashdot is hypocritical looks pretty justified. Opinions and comments anyone?