Thursday, September 6, 2007

Username and Password? Who needs them?

How many times have you browsed to a web site, just to read something, or do just that one thing, and were required to create a user, providing name, password (4 letters, 3 digits and no repetition), and an actual email address?

I used to do the Bob thing in the past. You know:
Username: bob
Password: bob123
Email: bob@hotmail.com (and may the real Bob forgive me - he probably got tons of spam...).

But now they got smarter: you can only log in after clicking a link sent to your email. Yes, you can create thousands of fictional emails on GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. But it's a hassle managing them.
So, here's a better solution: go to www.bugmenot.com, where nice users went through a registration process on many such sites and submitted their username/password for general use.

Once in a while the sites will expire that username, so what? There are plenty more.
Submit some of your own, or rate the existing ones. Oh, and no user/pass required to use the site :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I often use http://www.mailinator.com/ to create fictions Email for a short while. When a site asks you for Email address just for verification, invent a name and Email like kuku@mailinator.com . You can then check the Email after a few minutes. The Email is being deleted after a short while. No need to create an account, No questions asked.

Traveling Tech Guy said...

Yep, that will work. But I use BugMeNot to avoid going through the trouble of filling forms.