In a message dated: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 02:17:03 EST
Derek Martin said:
>Today, Kenneth E. Lussier gleaned this insight:
>
>> I am certainly not going to try and claim that FTP is secure. I'm not
>> going to claim to like it. What I am saying is that FTP has it's place.
>
>I don't really disagree with that, but I don't really agree either.
>EVERYTHING that ftp provides can be provided another way which is probably
>a LOT more secure. For anonymous file transfers, you can use HTTP.
>Apache might not be completely without security problems in it's history,
>but it's been pretty damn good.
[...snip...]
>If you can name one thing that FTP gets you that can't be accomplished
>another way, just as conveniently, I'll buy into the line that FTP has
>it's place. But I can't think of any. While I don't necessarily agree
>with all of Tod's reasoning, I do agree that FTP has outlived its
>usefulness. It isn't that it doesn't have any use, but that it can easily
>be replaced by other things with better track records, and which in every
>case I can think of are also a lot more flexible.
I disagree. For anonymous file retrieval where security isn't a concern,
ftp is by far the easiest, most flexible, and most efficient protocol around.
While you can transfer files with http, it's slow and ugly (heck, *writing*
http is slow and ugly!).
I agree that there are other methods to accomplish the same thing, but I don't
believe that they are as well known and commonplace, as flexible, or as
efficient.
SSH adds security through encytion, but I don't need that if I'm
grabbing something from an anonymous site. It is also slower,
since it's encrypted.
HTTP adds nothing more than convenience to the command-line
challenged. It's slow and bulky.
HTTPS adds the security of SSH, and simultaneously compounds
the problems of HTTP by also adding the complexity of encryption.
Usually my argument is always in favor of usingn what's most easily
wrapped up in a script. In this case, they can all be scripted, and they
can all be accessed via the command line or a GUI. Therefore, the only
thing left to compare are the protocols themselves. SSH does nothing for
publicly accessible sites, HTTP is slow and clunky. That leaves FTP.
If you don't like it, don't use it.
--
Seeya,
Paul
----
It may look like I'm just sitting here doing nothing,
but I'm really actively waiting for all my problems to go away.
If you're not having fun, you're not doing it right!
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