Bug Me Please--NOT!

Ever get annoyed by requests to log in to various websites, from the New York Times to Allmusic.com? Ever forget your logins? Web browsers can remember them for you, but a couple of people have organized their own way around it.

Bugmenot will provide a login and password that someone's created for any site in their database. It's easier to go to their site and type in a URL than it is to request your account info from a site and then go to your email, retrieve a message that will allow you to change your password...

Daily Kos, a blog, has also has a couple login and password pairs posted that work for most newspaper sites.

I read Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf, an early editor on Wired magazine. He reports that in the early days of Wired magazine, when they had one of the most-visited sites online, there were massive arguments between Wired staff over whether to require visitors to log in to their site. They ended up requiring log-ins, and some felt it put a dent in their traffic. I guess the point is to collect demographic info on visitors. But how useful is this? It's supposed to make advertising space more valuable, I guess, because you can tell advertisers who your site is reaching.

Anyway, I'm going to start using these public passwords and logins.