Sunday, February 15, 2009

Tired of Registering for Websites?

Check out BugMeNot.com

BugMeNot is an internet service that provides usernames and passwords to let Internet users bypass mandatory free registration on websites. Started in August 2003 by an anonymous person, later revealed to be Guy King[2], it aims to allow Internet users to access websites that have registration walls (for instance, that of The New York Times) without the requirement of compulsory registration. This came in response to the increasing number of websites that request such registration. Many Internet users find this to be an annoyance at best and a potential source of spam e-mail at worst. BugMeNot itself used to parody these sentiments in its own fake registration form.

BugMeNot allows users of their service to add new accounts for sites with free registration. It also encourages users to use such fake e-mail account services as Mailinator and Spamgourmet to create such accounts. However, it does not allow them to add accounts for pay websites, as this could potentially put BugMeNot in legal trouble. BugMeNot also claims to remove accounts for any web site that requests that they do not provide accounts for non-registered users.
To help make access to their service easier, BugMeNot hosts a bookmarklet that can be used with any browser to automatically find a usable account from their service. They also host extensions for the web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer (the extensions were created by Eric Hamiter with Dmytri Kleiner and Dean Wilson, respectively). There are also other good uses for BugMeNot, in the form of a BugMeNot widget for Opera, or UserJS scripts along with buttons, which makes it fully browser integrated.

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