Preparing for a conference, I saved the agenda from a web page to a file, so that I could read it on the train. I used the IE “web archive” feature, which saves a page to a single file with the extension .mht. When I re-opened the page later, I was suprised to see the following warning:

Something wrong here I reckon. Apparently my own hard drive is a phishing site.

I suppose IE7 has a point. After all, I’ve copied the page from one place to another, and although it looks like a page on the web, it isn’t. Then again, it isn’t criminal either. I’m using a feature of IE exactly as designed.

Amusing; but the difficulty I have with these kinds of false alarms is that they undermine the real ones. How is the non-technical user to know which warnings they can safely ignore? The danger is that they end up taking none of them seriously.