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Comment by fenesiistvan | Hacker News Reader

Why we should kill all well know old technologies? FTP should remain forever and if somebody wish to use it lets allow it. I don't understand all these kind of hype for new technologies. Are you kidding about Dropbox? Drop an old, well know tech by a fancy new protocol with vendor lock-in? Most of the issues listed here are already fixed in modern clients. I am using FTP every day on local LAN and also on internet. Never had any issue with connectivity, or firewalls (this is why passive mode was added) or file corruption. Not to talk about the ascii mode problem (That was a problem only with ancient unix clients).

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> Are you kidding about Dropbox? Drop an old, well know tech by a fancy new protocol with vendor lock-in?

That a bit of a false dichotomy, isn't it? SFTP (for example) is also a well-known, well-established, and open protocol, and suffers from none of the problems the article lists. The choice is not 'FTP or proprietary'.

But it suffers from other problems like compatibility. I never managed to get the filezilla ftp client to connect to a secure IIS ftp server. And visual studio for instance can't deploy to sftp.

Sounds like Microsoft has to up their game, then...

Where is he/she suggesting replacing FTP with Dropbox?

> (this is why passive mode was added) Did you not read their entire section on the problems with passive mode? I'm glad it works for your use cases, but for many of us, Rsync / SFTP is by far the better option.

I think he might've been referring to this sibling post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11252320

FTP is 40 years old and was designed for an internet where there was no NAT. Let it die already.

TCP is 40 years old and was designed for a world where there was no smartphones. Let it die already.

I've talked to people that earnestly hold this view and want everything to be on top of udp.

Well, there is QUIC and Mosh seems to be working quite well so it is true that UDP may make more sense in certain use cases.

Yeah there are definitely use cases where UDP makes sense and they're far from rare, but that doesn't mean TCP should be thrown out since there are still many cases where a reliable connection based protocol is better.

TCP doesn't really provide the reliability that people assume it does. UDP is often used because it is expected that the connection will be unreliable.

But why. Because that 3 extra MB on your hard disk occupied by an FTP client?

Otherwise IPv6 will give us back NAT free world again.

I am a big fan of backward compatibility and we should always try to avoid reinventing the wheel.

TCP/IP and email was also invented 40+ years ago.

No.

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