I may need some help here, folks, in the Comments section.

Bumping, since the WR site went back down shortly after I posted it.

The propeller-heads here will get more riled up about the Methodology of the study, I suppose.

The curious thing is that of the top 50 websites, Wikipedia got the "best" score for privacy, because instead of relying on automatic and impersonal "HTML cookies", "Flash cookies", and "beacons" to bird-dog users' activity, Wikipedia deploys "Mike.lifeguards", "COIbots", and "Adambros" to invade people's privacy, then actually publish publicly their opinionated assessments.

I gave it a shot, but AFAIK they don't use tracking cookies and similar "devices" - you can only go so far with these kinds of things before you start getting accused of FUD-spreading, which in this case might be a cure worse than the disease.

Seems kinda hypocritical for them to even study that sort of thing, considering that article page attempts to load the following items, few of which serve a legitimate purpose.

That's the modern Web. You can't browse it with a slow connection and an old computer anymore, because every damn commercial website wants to load scores of cross-site scripts. A Windows 98 PC with 64 megabytes of RAM used to be more than adequate for web-browsing, a mere 10 years ago. Anyone remember tinyapps.org? In fact, I used to have a Mac Quadra with only 36 megabytes, it successfully ran Netscape 4, albeit a bit slowly.

Today, it would probably hang the instant it went to the WSJ main page. People turn their noses up at a PC with less than 2 GB of memory---and they have to, because current applications love to waste main memory. And this is considered "progress"......

Wikipedia doesn't use lots of tracking cookies and JS (they didn't use any, until the new "scheme" went live ~3 months ago). However, I would not be surprised if they add more and more scripts in the future.
That's what programmers do in this hellish age of fatware---they look for ways to waste computing resources.

A Wikimedia Foundation staff member (low-totem variety) is now chiming in on the discussion there.

His mom is funny, though.

Jon, you bad boy!!

I commented too. Nice to see the glorious hero of Montreal, Nihiltres, trolling the Wall Street Journal website for Wikipedia articles, and Greg's comments thereon......is he your invisible siamese twin, Greg?? That boy gets around.

And now a word from Jean Valjean...


Would it not be an insult to electronic devices to characterize Adam Brookes (and other Javertian patrolmen) as an electronic tracking device?