Also, by broadcasting its user name and password, you have made your account unsecure. How long before someone "updates" the password just to mess with your users? It seems the only way to avoid that problem is to go back to not giving out a "master" log-in or to arrange a specific deal for easy access with the Times.
On the other hand, such a thing would not be allowed for a site like the Wall Street Journal which charges a subscription fee (NYT is free). Section 5a of their Subscriber Agreement makes that explicitly clear. http://online.wsj.com/subscriber_agreement
-Will Femia, MSNBC.com weblog producer
However, did the NYT authorize this "master" log-in or did Matthews do it on his own? If the NYT hasn't agreed to this type of mass log-in, they might react rather negatively, possibly invalidating that user account, or ensuring that multiple simultaneous log-ins aren't possible with the same account, or filing a lawsuit. If bloggers start sharing log-in info, which seems like a logical thing to do for the sake of convenience, it's going to reduce the accuracy of information gathered by any free registration system that allows multiple simultaneous log-ins with the same account. I wonder how difficult it is technically to prohibit that.
On the other hand, a newspaper that views blog links as a blessing could conceivably fine-tune its registration process to allow authorized bloggers to link to specific articles without requiring time-consuming registration of the reader. Or maybe certain specialized blogs might want to offer a "one-registration-fits-all" to its readers in conjunction with cooperating linked sources. (If you register at John Doe's Home Gardening Blog, you're automatically registered at its most commonly linked sources without filling out further forms. In exchange for cooperating with the blog, the newspaper sites get registration data that identifies the home gardening interests of the readers of that specialized blog.)
