The worst part is not that its 50 years old. The worst part is that some places still INSIST on using it. For instance I have to deal with FOTA and it's a pain.
I didn’t have the time/resources for a deep dive to determine the root cause of the problem so my work-around at the time was to use `stat` to compare file sizes of the local and uploaded file. If they didn’t match, the file was simply re-transmitted – and it always worked the second time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There's still millions of ftp servers running the wild: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=ftp
And this was a year or so after a major, and costly, rework was required due to a real-world system failure (no fatalities or injuries, fortunately) that would have been caught if testing had been more thorough. But testing wasn't more thorough because we simply couldn't actually flip switches fast enough to simulate a wide enough variety of behaviors, so the testing was woefully incomplete and the timing issue at the heart of the failure was sufficiently complex to be non-discoverable in code and design reviews. Literally having to spend several million out of pocket to fix a broken system wasn't enough on its own to cause them to let us improve our testing methods.
Worth noting, the cost of the new testing equipment was only in the 5-figure range, not the 7-figure range of the rework.
I had some related thoughts. They may have a strong content filter on their incoming web. I was sending them a CSV but we had to talk about it like it was a proprietary-format Excel document for the sake of those who would eventually be loading it with Excel.
My best guess eventually was that FTP was considered the best way to go around their content filter on purpose. Makes negative sense to me.