Hmm.

What an interesting little site BugMeNot is (FAQ here).

UPDATE: (Whoops! Thanks to The American Digest)

Comments

[Gary Farber]

Been built into Firefox .9 as an Extension.

I've used it for months, the better part of a year. Been around for quite a long time in Internet time, which is to say, several months. I'm not supposed to say "um," I'm told, but I'm kinda unclear what the point is here.

I ran into it long before using Firefox, but a thread on Firefox extensions might be educational for some. Before that, stuff on Firebird. Before that, stuff on open source. I'm pretty unclear where we're going here. Links to old utilities we recommend?

I'll be happy to help, and undoubtedly not one of the better sources.

Or were we on the ethical implications of misuse of BugMeNot? (Wouldn't looking at new software work better for that?; perhaps not; Bugmenot seems to be moving out in the world, long time later.)

[Gary Farber]

"(Whoops! Thanks to The American Digest)"

Um, what is this updating?

There's no bugmenot update there, nor anything said over the past few months. What's the update?

[sidereal]

The links points directly to the relevant thread.

The salience is that BugMeNot has just recently put up an intrusive form to be filled out only by people who work for organizations that require intrusive forms.

[aireachail]

A generous poster over at Tacitus clued me into BugMeNot in a Diary on Thursday.

I installed it (the I.E. plug-in) and it works just fine. The concept is really basic and the plug-in is nicely designed. No complaints.

I imagine there could be ethical considerations, but I'm agnostic on that issue right now. If I go to the NYT site on my own, I use my own account. For me it's a subtly different matter to follow an embedded link to a new site requiring registration. I can appreciate the fact that any linked article is work product and the source deserves compensation. That said, I've not seen any discussions to date as to whether the source of the article should provide some sort of compensation for all the additional traffic directed their way by the blogs. I think that (ethically) there should be some arrangement like that, and I wager it'll be forthcoming as this medium matures.

Until then, BugMeNot suits me fine.

[sidereal]

I think it's kind of fortunate, actually. It's gratifying to see the typical network response (view impediments as damage and route around them) successful again, but it'll delay the realization that gating oneself off makes one irrelevant. I wanted to see the NYT traffic numbers plummet. . instead BugMeNot and other account sharing plans will keep the traffic up.