Many of the people in this thread seem to think that AS is causing this problem and needs to fix it. They can't. It's eBay that's decided to arbitrarily require authentication in order to bid, and AS can't do anything about it. eBay is deliberately trying (and succeeding) to render sniper bots ineffective because newbies complain about sniping. If you've ever tried to deal with eBay, you know that they're arrogant enough to ignore whatever AS says. Of course, the fact that AS can't fix it means that regardless of whose fault it is, AS is now useless. But all of you ranting that AS needs to fix it or you'll go somewhere else need to understand that anywhere else will have the exact same problem.
NOTE TO CRAIG AT AS: You have the data to calculate how many bids you failed to make because of this. You can calculate how many of those auctions ended with no bids. (Yes, that might take some time, but pretty soon you'll have a bunch of employees with nothing to do.) Therefore you can calculate how much money eBay has lost because of this idiotic policy of theirs. Maybe if you put a $ in front of them they'd listen.