chongqed: Slashdot Webbugs

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Slashdot Webbugs

This isn't really related to anything link-spammy. But I just came across something that is worth a new post. Finally.

I have a little script that acts as my browser's homepage. It gathers a couple of RSS feeds, formats them, and let's me see the description and the links. One of those RSS feed is, of course, the slashdot feed.

Fortunately, I do all the parsing of the feeds manually, not relying on any CPAN modules that could do the job a lot better. I say "fortunately" because today, my little script let my browser to display its broken-image icon for every story on slashdot.

A look at the raw RSS confirmed that the description elements suddenly contained <img> tags. They point towards a 1 x 1 gif on slashdot. For example, today's Slashdot story about students sending a satellite into orbit has a hidden webbug with the URL rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?g=701. The story itself is linked to rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot?m=701.

Now all I want to know is: why?

¶ 09:55

Comments:

Seems fishy to me. I suppose they want to see how often and where their RSS feed is being read. They could easily look at their logs for how many times it is downloaded, but that doesn't tell them how often they are being read or at what site.

# posted by

JoeChongq (09:44)

I occasionally have images in my posts. If I wanted to grep for those images, I would have an idea of how many people read my feeds, without images turned off...

# posted by

Spamhuntress (14:44)

Hi Ann,

I guess the images that you have in your posts are a bit larger than 1 square pixel ;-)

I don't mind images, I don't even mind webbugs that much, but the fact that slashdot is serving them did come as a surprise to me.

# posted by

Manni (15:12)