Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by signaler on Saturday May 09, 2015 @05:54PM
(#9517840)
Please refer to my comment on Dysprosium's post for my answer on this. Also I may add that it is not a system for spammers, but a system like bugmenot where we can bypass the often arduous process of registration. I happen to have RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) on my wrist and registration forms are the final boss of the internet so although a system would be nice for myself, I can also see a huge need for others to use it.
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by na85 on Saturday May 09, 2015 @06:00PM
(#9517858)
Building an easily-automated registration system that's "not for spammers" is like building a back door into an encryption scheme that's "not for foreign state-sponsored hackers".
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by signaler on Saturday May 09, 2015 @06:08PM
(#9517884)
Automation is a small part of the system and not the main concern. The main concern is making the experience of surfing the web less harrowing for surfers and to make it more smooth. There are many walled garden sites arbitrarily locking away information and that is counter intuitive to what the web is about, which is free access to information. In the true nature of the web, there would be mechanisms in place to unlock information, like a web browser is expected to unlock information. People's use of fake useragents that spoof a Googlebot to access Quora being a perfect example.
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by nitrogen on Sunday May 10, 2015 @04:25AM
(#9519299)
"Small parts" that are "not the main concern" are often very juicy targets for attackers.
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by rylee on Saturday May 09, 2015 @06:00PM
(#9517859)
Have you considered looking into Lastpass? There's a really great feature called "Form Fills" which allows you to save your personal information to a profile, and then filling out registration forms is as simple as right clicking on the first field -> clicking "Form Fill".
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by signaler on Saturday May 09, 2015 @06:31PM
(#9517944)
Yeah I tried Lastpass. I love that feature, but it is not a silver bullet and it often gets things wrong, populating the wrong fields and also still requiring some manual effort. I use Lastpass but I was spooked last year when their servers were (briefly) taken offline. Be careful of hosted services with all your mission critical passwords stored there. I now do local copies of LP when I get the chance.
Thanks for inspiring me to start locally backing up my LastPass encrypted databases.
Say I'm a spammer. What's stopping me using this?
Given that, why wouldn't website providers take active steps to block this?
I'd say browser auto compete solves 85% of this issue. The last 15% his the law of diminishing returns pretty quickly.
Re:A digital skeleton key to access any website
by MichaelCrawford on Saturday May 09, 2015 @11:31PM
(#9518678)
I'm looking for a way to submit new links to a list of computer employers that I'm building. I face the problem of spammers, specifically. One idea I have in mind is for the registration form to be at a new url every time, generated for that specific registration, with a significant time delay before my server coughs up the URL.
If I do it right, to a live human it will appear that the internet is just a little slow at the time.
Why the fuck would any service provider want to make it easy for spammers to automate mass registrations as the author seems to want?
It's literally the reason CAPTCHA was invented.