Signing in to websites from other websites

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 15:59

Hey guys,

I've noticed on some websites, like auctionsniper or most social networking sites you can log in to other sites like ebay or hotmail to retrieve your account details or contacts or whatever from that site.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to do this and the technology behind it. I am specifically interested into logging in to MySpace accounts.

Any help much appreciated,

Thanks!

Lagz · 2 Jan 2007 at 17:17

I suspect that such sites just take your login details, log in to your account using autonomous web navigation, and parse the resulting web page to retrieve the relevant details.

Automated web browsing can be done using many languages and tools. For example:
http://www.codeproject.com/cs/samples/automatingwebbrowsing.asp

Wimnat · 2 Jan 2007 at 18:11

That sounds like what i want to do. Any examples for php?

Sic · 2 Jan 2007 at 20:33

i really doubt that myspace would let you. their security team is probably higher paid than those at the pentagon. if you could do it, you'd have to be proficient in cURL, i should imagine. i've never had the need to use it though

Lagz · 2 Jan 2007 at 20:58

Sic said:
i really doubt that myspace would let you. their security team is probably higher paid than those at the pentagon. if you could do it, you'd have to be proficient in cURL, i should imagine. i've never had the need to use it though

Well using the ActiveX control would definitely work, since its just logging in using a normal browser, then parsing the resulting page to extract information. Its not like myspace are actually letting you directly into the backend of their site or anything.

No idea about php, I'm not sure its really suitable (although I dont know really). You would probably need a pretty large backend program to extract the information you want. People would also be very suspicious about trusting you with their myspace login details unless you actually have a really really good reason for needing it.