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But, if the site is using only HTTP and cookies, there's no reason not to first make a request to the login page with the username/password and retrieve the cookie via the "cookie" header that comes back... Did I totally misread the article, or was it just dumb?

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A lot of scraping frameworks will handle it for you, too. It's even the front page example code @ http://jwebunit.sourceforge.net/

I think most people are reacting to the title... I for example thought it was a security posting.

Of course there are frameworks to do this for you, and I'm sure jwebunit will work perfectly well. I guess I'm disappointed that the author didn't understand the fact that Firefox doesn't perform magic, and that a login page is no different than anything else being scraped.

I'm disappointed the author didn't realize that he doesn't need Cookie Monster to see Firefox cookies: Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies

I think you misread the article.

I definitely didn't. The article mentions that you login, pull out the cookies, copy the value INTO your code, and since his examples are using java, recompile it.

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