NickCoons - 8:32 am on Aug 5, 2004 (gmt 0)

<As far as I know, FTP is only not very secure because it sends everything in the clear with no encryption. That's the case whether your connection is open for five minutes or five days.>

That's right.. the security issue is not in being connected, but in transferring data, as anyone sitting in the middle of that connection can intercept and view (or change) what's happening. Even more importantly, you're sending your username and password in plain text, so establishing an FTP connection is the most vulnerable portion of the process.

You may want to look into SFTP and/or SCP. Both of these run over SSH.