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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

I'd seriously hope those (very serious) people use SFTP, at least.

I was always under impression that SFTP has much more in common with SCP, than with FTP. Is that wrong?

You are correct that SFTP is not FTP. To be fair to the parent, he didn't say so either. Here are the differences between FTPS, SFTP and FTP over SSH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#Secure_F...

My original point was merely that FTP is far from dead for general purpose file transfer. It can still be quite safe if precautions are taken with encrypting the data first. Anyone looking at it will see nothing but gobbledegook, naturally.

It isn't dead and yes, of course, I know the difference between FTP and SFTP.

And my original point was that FTP is inherently insecure. It's transmitting username and password in the clear, for starters.

(To be clear, I'm talking about plain vanilla RFC-959 FTP. Yes, you can add additional security layers on top. Sadly, at least the places I've seen still use FTP are the places that still use it in vanilla config. I have no idea what your experiences are - this is a comment on the general state of FTP users.)

Just found out my father's work does all of their EDI transactions via unsecured FTP. This is like billions of dollars in orders, checks, etc that are being passed around via FTP.

Stop doing this people. There are far better formats than FTP, and yes, even better and more appropriate than SFTP.

(Further, even if Drive supported it, are y'all going to be uploading your private keys to Drive?)

Of course, and then some.

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