If you’re anything like me, you hate having to login to gain access to news stories online. Since I sometimes link to such stories, I thought I’d post a tip for bypassing this annoyance… In case you haven’t heard, there’s a service out there called BugMeNot. This site is a repository for usernames/passwords for sites with compulsory registration — just hop over to it, look up the site you’re interested in, and you’re good to go. The problem with this is that it takes a bit of effort, and I’m kind of lazy… Enter the FireFox web browser and the BugMeNot FireFox extension.

Simply install the extension and then, the next time you run into a compulsory login, just right click on the username field, select ‘BugMeNot’ and be amazed as the username/password fields are automagically filled in for you. From time to time you’ll run into username/password combos that no longer work. Never fear — just repeat the above and you’ll get a fresh set of login information (the BugMeNot database generally has multiple entries for popular sites).

And if you run into a site that isn’t in the BugMeNot database, do us all a favor… Create a dummy login and add it to the database.