Hari's Corner

I have always hated binary downloads: you know - the files you cannot download except by clicking on a link on a popup and which hides the real download URL behind a redirection page or a script. The kinds where you cannot just copy the URL and allow your download manager to connect. But when I experienced it again with none other than ATI, I have really discovered a new level of hatred for this phenomenon. I just wanted to download the latest ATI Linux driver for my Radeon 9600Pro card, so I went to their Linux driver download page. The download size is about 60 MB in size so I fired up KGet. Nasty surprise! KGet only downloads a stub HTML file of about a few KB whenever I try to use the link. The real download URL is hidden behind a redirection or a script. The only way to download it is to use the browser.

Here is a message from this stub HTML file:

You're using a download manager. Download managers usually offer to search for alternative download locations. While this is nice for the user, it's bad for the webmaster because a download which originated on another site could theoretically still be downloaded from this site, without anybody knowing. Workaround to this restriction: Set up your download manager to send a HTTP referrer, and when you click on a link on the ATI site the download will then be authorized.

The people at ATI ought to know better than putting me through all this hassle as a user of an ATI chipset product! I still don't understand their workaround instruction which is about as cryptic and user-unfriendly as it can get. For that matter, the whole ATI website is a mess of cryptic URLs and "authorized pages" which cannot be linked to properly. I'd sure like to meet their webmaster. I have a thing or two to say to him/her.

I can understand protecting important content using binary downloads. Probably software you wouldn't want anybody to download just like that without a password. But a free driver, for God's sake! If the download size was insignificant (maybe a few hundred KB maximum) it doesn't really matter. But when you have a huge download of several megabytes, you'd better give a great reason for preventing people from downloading stuff using an ordinary download manager. There are still a lot of people in this world who're on slow speed connections including dial-up, you know! What can I say? As a webmaster you'd better respect them or you wouldn't win too many fans.