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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

Understand this: ftp has been with the browser for 25 years. Ftp has been with the web. Ftp is part of the web. No one cares that ftp is not really what browsers are made for. Browsers is how people access ftp. That’s it. And they have been used in of web pages too.

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Yeah, really gonna need some numbers here, though, because literally no one I know younger than 40 even knows what FTP is, let alone having used it.

Even Apache 1 can expose dirs over http instead of ftp, there is literally no reason for FTP unless you want uploads. In which case: no you don't, you want sftp at the very least, because you care about the fact that you want data that gets uploaded to be your data, not the data that a MITM trivially changed it to. Which FTP fully allows.

I'm 30 years old and using FTP daily.

For what? What client?

I use it for....drumroll... transferring files

usually waterfox if I'm only transferring one, something else if I need to do a bunch.

Transferring huge files. The client is FileZilla.

Why not use SFTP or rsync at this point?

SFTP is slow. https://serverfault.com/questions/559501/ftp-ftps-sftp-scp-s...

https://support.cerberusftp.com/hc/en-us/articles/203333215-...

Rsync is not available on the target machine.

> because literally no one I know younger than 40 even knows what FTP is, let alone having used it.

How many of them know what TLS is? Yet they've probably used it. With computers, you don't need to know what something is to have used it.

Sure, they also use C6H12O6 every day, and interbank networks, but if we listed everything that wasn't similar to FTP we'd be here a while. FTP is "a thing" you intentionally use. You connect to FTP servers, and upload or download files, in the same way that HTTP is a thing you intentionally use to consumer web pages. TLS it just an aspect of how connections are negotiated and is on a completely different rung of the ladder of abstraction.

> in the same way that HTTP is a thing you intentionally use to consumer web pages.

Nope. I just clicky the link.

no one I know younger than 40 even knows what http or https is. Https can also be MITM.

HTTPS can be MITM'd, but absolutely not trivially, unlike FTP.

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