BugMeNot.com when it first appeared quickly leaped into my list of favorite sites. In case you’re not familiar with it, it is a simple freely open database which contains information so that you may bypass pointless logins at things like news websites, etc. You know the type, like when you click on a link in your favorite blog to an article at the NY Times, and it asks you to “register” and log in and bend over backwards just so you can read a 500 word essay on how scientists discover you should drink water when you’re thirsty. BugMeNot gives you a leg-up to getting around this kind of stuff by offering you logins which others have created. This way, you don’t have to give out your email, get a bunch of fucking spam from these companies, and you also get to throw off all their precious tracking statistics (well, at least a little).

Anyway, when this site first came out, I was “thoroughly stoked” to have that kind of resource. But I’ve been noticing a lot of problems with it lately. Which leads me to wonder whether or not it’s been compromised. A good many of the logins which it contains for various sites seem to not work anymore. I wonder if some companies have been lashing back at them, going to BugMeNot and flooding it with bad information. Seems like there’s pretty much no way to prevent that from happening, because anyone is allowed to add information into the database. Of course, there is a button you can click under each data set you receive from BugMeNot that says “this login didn’t work.” Hopefully, if they receive X number of negative votes, information is wiped from the database. Who knows. I’d have to look into it more.