and furthermore, since the entire session (not just the login) is likely to be https, you won't be able to scrape the gibberish. you can automate pressing buttons etc, but the https info sent from the server will not be intelligable, afaik.
the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H
If we implement the scraper as a browser plugin/addon, the browser will provide the HTTPS content (and even the DOM) for us. IIRC, Chrome permits an addon/extension to insert some script to any page and do cross-domain AJAX request (after the user allows it).