IBM Labs has squeezed out a beta version of a Firefox add-on that records a user's online activities so they can be repeated automatically or be printed out for others as step-by-step instructions. Concocted by IBM Almaden Research Center, the CoScripter Reusable History add-on is designed to reduce repetitive browser-based …

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Friday 19th February 2010 11:57 GMT Studley

Share scripts for updating Facebook status?

Anybody who needs assistance with how to update their Facebook status should probably not be on Facebook in the first place.

Not sure I understand the breakthrough here. Click-recording has been available in SQA tools, including those available as free browser plugins (*cough* Selenium), for years. The difference here is... the text output ("go to www.amazon.com" etc)? In most cases, you could write that stuff down quicker than you could record it, particularly on websites with poor object naming - "click the Go button" is all very well, but what's a user supposed to do when you send them the command "click the btnEDIT052 button"?

oh, and @ 0m50sec: pause, zoom in. Well done to the dev for revealing his gmail address.

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Friday 19th February 2010 11:57 GMT BristolBachelor

Looks good, but

I should first say that this looks very interesting. BUT

1. What happens when the website changes between recording the history and playing it back? Are you just a passenger as it goes off and buys 17 first class tickets to Australia for £20k each? just watching as it clicks links that were different before? Extreme case maybe, but what happens?

2. This now means that someone could tell what your internet banking passcode is even if it one that gets you to select the letters from a drop down box to avoid key-loggers. (Admittedly, this could be solved by instead giving a table and randomising the location of the letters, but that would take some website development, and is not as easy to use.

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Friday 19th February 2010 12:10 GMT Anonymous Coward

Excellent - give it to Pennsylvania

I think IBM should immediately contact Lower Merion School District (PA) and tell them that they missed a trick.

I mean, if you start observing students illegally through their school laptop webcam, I would imagine recording their every activity is just one more step towards a degree of control the New Labour government would kill for.

In short: no IBM, don't like this idea. It will give others ideas for less benign purposes.

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Friday 19th February 2010 12:38 GMT Adam Nealis

How is this different from iMacros?

How is this different from iMacros?

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1. Monday 22nd February 2010 10:36 GMT Whatever city
  
  selenium, molybdenum ?
  
  is there anything special about this that hasn't already been done a long time ago with testing tools such as SElenium or molybdenum, I already use selenium for repeating annoying sequences that I sometimes go through on various websites
  
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Friday 19th February 2010 12:40 GMT Blue eyed boy

How long before

the invisible, remote-controlled version is (a) offered to the spooks (b) developed independently by the blackhats?

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Friday 19th February 2010 12:44 GMT ShaggyDoggy

Hits

Excellent, now my webpage hit counter can go astro while I leave this thing clicking on it all night

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1. Friday 19th February 2010 18:15 GMT Studley
  
  Unique Visitors
  
  Which is why nobody with an iota of sense has paid any attention to hit counters since about 1997. Besides, if that's your game, just use Firefox with ReloadEvery, or just edit your hit counter (most counters worth their salt will let you choose a starting value for the counter anyway).
  
  On the otherhand, if you could parameterise this script to fire off a plethora of connections to your site via different proxys... *mwuhaha* (or maybe a self-constructed DDoS attack - whoops)
  
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