(no subject)

[eirias]

Quick technical pondering: how do services like TimesSelect prevent people from "donating" their logins to services like BugMeNot? I mean, I suppose it'd be easy enough to track things like "how often is it used?" and "how many people use it at once?" and "how often does the IP change?" (though wireless coffee shops are making the latter a bad criterion, I suppose) The thing that's sticky (in my head) is that AFAICT they don't actually do this with normal logins (otherwise BugMeNot etc wouldn't work), and the same login works for both activities. Might there just be a toggle like "check for abuse? (Y/N)" that would be set based on your TimesSelect status?

Comments

[eldan.livejournal.com]

I have borrowed friends' logins for sites before, and vice versa. I reckon the only way they could get caught (without causing many false positives) is watching for simultaneous logins. Even then they'd have to give some slack (what about me using two different computers and not logging out on the first one, for instance?) but they could close down an account that has too many (however exactly they want to define that) simultaneous logins.

Or they could do something like blogger does, where logging in from any computer automatically logs out any other that is also logged in. It's only mildly annoying for legitimate users, and it doesn't really stop people occasionally sending their friends an article and saying "use these login details" (which I imagine they're not too worried about, since it's only a small step from "I'll lend you my copy of the magazine"), but it would make bugmenot impractical.