Public File Access

Although, by the time you read this, the problem will be solved, I felt it worthwhile to air the alternatives I am considering.

Since we may finish up with quite a lot of data, especially images and mp3s, I am reluctant to host them at my base website - amazonsystems.co.uk.

At first, I thought humyo.com the ideal situation for the public airing and sharing of files. I set up a Bridge account and uploaded some data files to it. However, it developed that files stored there were not freely available to web users who did not have their own humyo account. A possible solution is to set up a "guest" account at humyo, an account with read permission for the Bridge account, and publish the username and password on the blog, so anyone could have access. The downside of this is that the huge filestore (10 Gigs) on the guest account would be tempting to spammers, pornographers and other time-wasters. You can be sure they would not fail to exploit the space in some horrid fashion, and I would get the blame.

A "public" Gmail account could be used. Ideally, the data could be held as attachments to bogus emails (this usage of Gmail is quite common). Again, unfortunately, such an account would be open to abuse.

In either of the above instances, I could deliver the keys of the accounts only to those who requested them, but this would discourage casual surfers and people of a suspicious disposition, without protecting me from those who pretended an interest only to gain access to the online storage for their own ends.

The ideal medium for public data is webspace, and I am confident of finding some free webspace somewhere. I am already using a few such sites for various fringe projects, but all have rather small webspace quotas for free users. I may finish up paying for extra webspace on my own site. Sigh.