sent in this excellent
hack!
I added a few lines of code to "http-lib.pl" which allows
for Basic authentication to the GET method. You
can call this by passing in two [optional] arguments,
$login and $password, at the end of the normal
HTTPGet arguments. If neither is passed then no
authentication is used.
Note that the authentication addition requires Perl5,
and the MIME::Base64 module.
Here is the code.