May 06, 2009, 10:07 PM
I don't know if you mean that you want to only allow authenticated access to a file/dir or provide access to a link without authentication, but I think the latter is a bad idea.
Cox Communications provides a service called the "Digital Vault" where you can share private media with other people. The trouble is, it's based merely on security by obscurity - the link is obfuscated in such a way that you don't know what it's going to pull up, but a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters would find most of the files in a short amount of time without previously having been given the link. It's just a long series of characters. Not truly private!
PHP or CGI perl can handle the former as well, albeit not as well as htaccess (or NTFS permissions or ASP in IIS). So, I would use an authentication scheme.
Cox Communications provides a service called the "Digital Vault" where you can share private media with other people. The trouble is, it's based merely on security by obscurity - the link is obfuscated in such a way that you don't know what it's going to pull up, but a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters would find most of the files in a short amount of time without previously having been given the link. It's just a long series of characters. Not truly private!
PHP or CGI perl can handle the former as well, albeit not as well as htaccess (or NTFS permissions or ASP in IIS). So, I would use an authentication scheme.