We mentioned these guys before, but in case you missed it, Wired has a story on them. Basically, they’re completely ruining the “you must register to read this story” paradigm hamhandedly adopted by a good chunk of the newspaper industry. Sham logins are nothing new; there are several common-knowledge name/password pairs for the New York Times, for example. BugMeNot takes it up a notch, though: they have logins for some 14,000 sites, and there’s even a Mozilla plug-in to make it even more effortless. What’s not to like?

It occurs to me that this tactic is basically the same as signing up for a grocery store affinity card with a false address (or with someone else’s address); you’re spoofing the system because the “authentication” is meaningless and invasive compared to the payoff. Why should I pay above-market prices for groceries because I won’t give Kroger my home address? Likewise, why give up any data at all in exchange for reading news we can get from a hundred other sites for free?