Thursday, August 19, 2004

Bugmenot we hardly knew ye

Bugmenot.com was a great idea. An idea whose time had clearly come. And an idea whose time, it seems has clearly gone.

The idea was this. Instead of you registering for a new site every time you wanted to read a new york times article, you just go to bugmenot and they would hand you a handy dandy username and password that was, get this: already registered. This saves you the tedious time of thinking up fake email addresses or, worse, having to register a fake hotmail address just to get the confirmation email. It even came with a handy firefox plugin that would allow you to right click on the page and pop up a user name and password then and there.

Admittedly, if I gave a fuck who was reading my stuff, I might be a tad perturbed by the idea of people sharing password and identities and whatnot. On the other hand, I might be surprised to learn that you can't always trust who's at the other end of an ethernet cable. I might wise up and say "If I'm going to let everyone register for free to see this stuff, and a suspicious number of my users have email addresses like fuck@you.com or h@t.com, perhaps I should just skip that pesky registration in the first place!"

Bugmenot, an efficient warrior in the war against internet stupidity, struck down.