

Bookmarklet to bypass NYT registration - prakash
http://arvindn.livejournal.com/119230.html

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timf
The author comments below the entry: "more about personally doing something to
combat the lunacy of forced-registration"

After setup, it takes me one click to bypass the problem, too: using my stored
username and password.

I fear I am turning into a crabby old man, but seriously, does the NYtimes owe
you something? Considering the value that it provides at no monetary cost,
having an anonymous handle to contact me at or track what I read (or rather,
what an anonymous representation of me reads) seems like a more than fair
trade to me.

~~~
derwiki
I think this -particular- author would content that there is no such thing as
an anonymous representation (see
<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/abstracts.html#netflix>)

~~~
timf
Quoting...

" _Q: You are not really de-anonymizing anyone, because your algorithm cannot
link identities to anonymous Netflix records.

Here is how our algorithm works. If you already know someone's identity and a
few of the movies this person liked or disliked, you can use the Netflix
dataset to find their entire movie viewing history prior to 2005 (provided, of
course, they were a Netflix subscriber and their record was one of those
released as part of the dataset)._"

I don't see how this is the same situation. The NYtimes already possesses my
reading history (if I'm logged in), what I am hiding from them is my identity
and the work in this paper does not help them find that out. The only thing
that will help them with this task is to coerce my ISP to identify an IP
address (if I don't happen to be using Tor).

