Easily bugged

A secretive computer programmer is giving the online news business a new headache: a website that helps users avoid registering at online media outlets. The collection includes logins for dozens of by-registration-only sites.

The Bugmenot site says it's a protest against sites that give away news content in exchange for users' demographic data. Bugmenot users contribute login IDs, which others can use to defeat the free registration process. The most popular sites are major newspapers, like the The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. (Registrations started appearing on news sites in the mid-1990s, before subtler tracking technologies such as cookies and web bugs became popular.)

Bugmenot's programmer, who is believed to hail from Australia, argues that registration enables spam, wastes time, and-because so many users lie when filling out registration forms-generates useless demographic data. Bugmenot claims only to accept logins for free services and promises to remove any that point to premium content. No news outlet has taken serious action against the site, although some regularly delete posted logins.

New internet speed record

While millions of ordinary internet users use broadband services that blow away old dialup connections, a select few can access a next-generation network that runs over 100 times faster than today's cable and DSL links.

The Internet2 project is an experimental digital playground intended to generate improvements for the world's data highway. Only universities, companies, and institutions can access this turbo-charged pipeline, which bypasses many of the delays and logjams that affect conventional internet traffic.

It also enables some amazing experiments. One of Internet2's most prominent benefits is high-resolution videoconferencing, in which people can send live pictures back and forth without glitches or distortion. This month, researchers set a new speed record, sending 859 gigabytes of data in less than 17 minutes, a rate 10,000 times faster than typical home broadband.

While Internet2's tinkerers get to play with advanced connectivity, their project harkens back to the early years of the internet, before the web boom, which some saw as robbing bandwidth from academics and researchers. Internet2 was created to give reign to educators and the technology elite, as the regular internet once did.

Bits & Megabytes