FTP Is 40 Years Old 253
An anonymous reader writes "FTP celebrates its 40th birthday tomorrow. Originally launched as the RFC 114 specification, which was published on 16 April 1971, FTP is arguably even more important today than when it was born. Frank Kenney, vice president of global strategy for US managed file transfer company Ipswitch, said that the protocol we know as FTP today is 'a far cry from when Abhay Bushan, a student at MIT, wrote the original specifications for FTP.' According to Kenney, the standard has grown from 'a simple protocol to copy files over a TCP-based network [to] a sophisticated, integrated model that provides control, visibility, compliance and security in a variety of environments, including the cloud.'"
The cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
mod parent up (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless the TFA is talking about SFTP (which it isn't), there is no reason to laud anything positive about FTP. Other than it was a straightforward protocol and it served us well, back in the day.
Biased much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Asking the vice president of global strategy of a company built around its FTP client to comment on the relevance of FTP is a bit like asking an Adobe marketing executive about the importance of Flash, no?
Re:Oh please (Score:2, Insightful)
Defense in depth in all but really Firewalls suck, and break the Internet. Its not FTP that is broken its systems that need firewalling that are. That said there is no operating system in common use, Linux included, that should not be behind a firewall, at the very least a local software based one.
The control channel being on a separate socket from the data channel allows FTP to do things like XFTP where a client can broker a transfer between servers without needing to participate in it.
Re:Oh please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh please (Score:2, Insightful)
Using a firewall to close ports is the most ridiculous thing ever.
Just tell the bloody program that opened the port not to open it!
If you actually do that, the firewall isn't needed because you actually have a clue and configured the system correctly.
Re:Oh please (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of people grousing about how awful FTP is. I bet not one of you will ever write a piece of software that is still hugely popular and under active development 40 years later.
Except, FTP isn't a piece of software. It's a Protocol. As far as I can tell from a cursory search, no particular FTP daemon is still in wide use that was written 40 years ago.