Services like BugMeNot.com are helping people get around the registration required of various news sites. Many sites like the New York Times require readers to complete a free registration before accessing much of their content in order to enable them to gather statistics necessary for selling advertising. For some reason, a lot of people feel that giving a little personal information in return for a free service is too intrusive, so they go to sites like BugMeNot to get a shared login name and password that can't be traced back to them. Holy freeloaderism, Batman! People are way too paranoid!

Here's what I recommend to sites like the Times: whenever a logged-in browser accesses your site, record the time and their IP address. If you get requests from one login account with more than X number of different IP addresses within some period of time, temporarily suspend the account. Don't let BugMeNot bug you.

The next thing BugMeNot would do is to to get it's visitors to create new login accounts and post the usernames and passwords. Then they'd parcel out a different username and password to each visitor using a round robin system to reduce the probability of too many people using the same one in a short period of time. But I doubt that supply would keep up with demand. After all, their visitors are there because they don't want to register.

They might also build a system to automatically create new accounts. The sites might protect against this by limiting the number of accounts that can be created from a particular IP address and/or email address in a particular period of time. They could also require typing in an obfuscated string of numbers and letters, as is often done, to help slow that down, though BugMeNot's users could enter those themselves rather than having an automated system do it.

A final suggestion is for sites like the Times to go on to BugMeNot, find the shared usernames, and to cancel those accounts completely. If enough of the usernames on BugMeNot's list are useless, people won't bother going there to get usernames.

Reader Comment:
Anonymous said:
Close your eyes and imagine a web in which every site requires you to register. GET IT YET?
(join the conversation below)

Hosting a website is not free. Hosting a large website is expensive. Producing content for a website can be expensive. The people who provide expensive services for free have every right a require a little information in order to be able to make the money required to support those services.