List of examples:
http://streamingradioguide.com/adm/player-type.php?playerid=9&action=listall
What it does:
Loads up about 40k of Javascript and 40k of graphics (a Flash app would download all of that in one file)
If you don’t have a cookie for the station, it pesters you to register
Says “Hey, I have a live one!” to addthis, a site that is an aggregator for social networking sites – by putting an addthis link on a web page, you’re basically announcing to the whole world who just loaded your player
Cue the flood of Facebook Content Delivery Network tracking crap! – it’s very complicated and will need further study – but it looks like Facebook is using css stylesheets to pass information back and forth to ad networks – kind of like Flash cookies, but even more difficult to block. The browser can’t run without style sheets and style sheets were not intended to pass data secretly between domains.
This player then does something truly bizarre. For each 67 kb of the audio stream, it issues another http:// request over port 443 – but not using https: This is probably to bypass firewall, since it looks somewhat like just routine web traffic. One other quirk is after you click the Stop icon on the player to stop the stream, that doesn’t stop the download of the stream…. the 67kb at a time downloads keep happening forever.
It’s been pointed out to me it is 67 bytes, not 67 kB 🙂 My eyes are a bit irritated at the moment.