Correct. But as a geek site, slashdot should know better and lead by example.

And yes, other companies do look towards (perceived) geek sites such as slashdot, gnu.org and redhat.com in order to justify their own inadequacies. A while back, our company was putting a new website online, which had huge horse blinkers. When I pointed this out to the webmasters, their response was yeah, but just look your geek friends at gnu.org (which indeed had small blinkers at the time) and redhat.com (which is just fugly).

The situation has become so bad that even the pirate party has sites where half the links won't work, where the only way to make a donation is Paypal (even though most potential donators are local, and could use an IBAN bank account number).

So, slashdot, digg, heise.de, freshmeat, gnu.org, redhat: cut down on the crap, it's not only your own sites that you are littering, but the internet as a whole! Or, if you're actually enjoying turning the Internet into a landfill, then please stop the hypocrisy of posting articles complaining about it.

Even if the user would have authority to grant access to third parties, trying to extract that access under duress would still be a crime. The real question is whether the threat of loss of employment counts as duress, or whether duress has to be a physical threat against life or health, such as a gun pointed to user's head.

But the company interferes with a contract that Facebook has with its end user. And tortuous interference is an actionable claim:

... until Facebook notices that you used a Linux app to upload your photos, bans the app, and yanks all your photos.
The mistake has been corrected since then, but it's still a chilling experience.

Although URL shortening services are often abused to do invasive statistics, that's not the only reason why they exist...

You know, some people still use them to shorten URLs (like how else would you fit a long google maps URL into a short twitter message?)

More like the difference between a sports car and a truck.

The sports car gets you faster to your destination (low latency), but the truck allows you to haul more stuff (high bandwidth).

May I remind you that Facebook is a website too?

Not true. My father successfully got a police report in Lisbon (564657 inhabitants) for a stolen wallet, which contained far less than $300. And there was a huge queue, so it's not as if the police were underworked either.