Hack #84. Bypass Annoying Site Registrations

Autofill privacy-invading registration pages.

Many online newspapers require you to register with the site before being able to read online articles. This registration is annoying, invasive, and a serious privacy risk. (Several newspaper publishing companies have been caught selling their registration information to spammers.) A site called BugMeNot.com (http://www.bugmenot.com) has sprung up to aggregate fake logins for such sites. This hack takes BugMeNot one step further by integrating it into the login page itself.

The Code

This user script runs on all pages. It is most useful on online newspaper sites, such as The New York Times online, that require mandatory registration in order to read news articles, but the script is designed to work on any site.

Save the following user script as bugmenot.user.js:

 // ==UserScript== // @name Bug Me Not // @namespace http://www.reifysoft.com/?scr=BugMeNot // @description Bypass required registration using Bug Me Not // @include * // ==/UserScript== // based on code by Matt McCarthy // and included here with his gracious permission // new logins gotten from the current page (reset on every page load) var retrievals = 0; // millisecond delay between a field losing focus and checking to see // if any other of our fields has focus. If this is too low, the menu // won't work because it will get "display: none" and its onclick // won't fire. var BLUR_TIMEOUT = 150; var allInputs = null; var bmnView = "http://bugmenot.com/view.php"; ...

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