More goodness from George Skarbek’s column in The Age (19-Jul-2005).

A punter asks George about sending large files across the net. One suggestion is to set up a web host, and the reader is sent off to GoDaddy to find out about domain names and hosting fees, and even ponders if a web server should be set up on their own computer. Uhh, but these days but most ISPs provide a basic web hosting facility, good enough as a drop point for leaving big files… surely it’s better to look at this first? Not to mention the many online storage services, such as Yahoo Briefcase.

A question about whether one should turn on IE’s “Do not save encrypted pages to disk” option comes up with some gibberish about “static web pages and dynamic data”. Eh? The point of this option is explained in IE’s help: it avoids the browser saving the pages onto the hard disk where they might be snooped upon by other users on the same computer. Since an HTML page is plain text, and depending on the site used, user or session IDs or even passwords could be embedded in the HTML, in some environments it might be desirable to not save this in the cache.

(Don’t get me wrong; most of George’s answers are spot on. Just a few that haven’t quite lived up to expectations, and it’s been bugging me a bit…)