BugMeNot

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The BugMeNot website.

BugMeNot is an Internet service that provides usernames and passwords to let Internet users bypass mandatory free registration on websites. Started in August 2003 by an anonymous person, it aims to allow Internet users to access websites that have registration walls (for instance, that of The New York Times) without the requirement of compulsory registration. This came in response to the increasing number of websites that request such registration. Many Internet users find this to be an annoyance at best and a potential source of spam e-mail at worst. BugMeNot itself used to parody these sentiments in its own fake registration form^[1].

1 Use of the service
2 Temporary shutdown and return
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Use of the service

The original BugMeNot website.

BugMeNot allows users of their service to add new accounts for sites with free registration. It also encourages users to use such fake e-mail account services as Mailinator and Spamgourmet to create such accounts. However, it does not allow them to add accounts for pay websites, as this could potentially put BugMeNot in legal trouble. BugMeNot also claims to remove accounts for any web site that requests that they do not provide accounts for non-registered users. Other websites are also blocked from being used with the service, including Wikipedia.

To help make access to their service easier, BugMeNot hosts a bookmarklet that can be used with any browser to automatically find a usable account from their service. They also host extensions for the web browsers Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer (the extensions were created by Eric Hamiter and Dean Wilson, respectively) that can accomplish the same.

[edit] Temporary shutdown and return

Almost exactly a year after it was created, BugMeNot was shut down temporarily by their service provider at that time, Hostgator. The site's creator claimed that he believed the site's host was pressured by websites to shut them down, though Hostgator claimed that the BugMeNot site was repeatedly crashing their servers.^[2]

The BugMeNot domain was transferred briefly to another hosting company, dissidenthosting.com, but before the site was set up, it began to redirect visitors to web pages belonging to racist and/or fascist groups, without the knowledge or consent of the site's owner. BugMeNot moved again, to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. BugMeNot's move to this provider, which hosts a number of controversial sites including the British neo-nazi group Combat 18 and their hit list site Redwatch, prompted BugMeNot's creator to say, "Personally, I don't care if I'm sharing a server with neo-Nazis. I might not agree with what they have to say, but the whole thing about freedom of speech is that people are free to speak."^[3]

Shortly after BugMeNot returned, reports surfaced that some news sites had begun to attempt to block accounts posted on BugMeNot, though the extent and effectiveness of such efforts, as well as compliance with BugMeNot's Terms of Use^[4], are not known.