Chromium: FTP resources will be marked “Not Secure”

[DonHopkins]

I liked to leave a file in the top level public ftp directory called "README" that contained just the line:

    README: No such file or directory.

Somebody once emailed me complaining they couldn't read that file. I told them to run "emacs README" because emacs could solve any problem. Never heard back!

[fiddlerwoaroof]

He's probably still trying to quit emacs

[thinkMOAR]

In my humble opinion, i find the label 'not encrypted' better fitting than 'not secure'.

[ edit after replies ]

Agreed, perhaps i unrightfully assumed people now what 'encrypted' means. Growing up with computers i don't know any better and sometimes forget or can't properly imagine what layman know and don't know.

[cesarb]

HTTPS is more than just "encrypted", it's also "authenticated". That is, plain-text HTTP and FTP is not only "Not Encrypted", but also "Not Authenticated"; saying "Not Secure" captures both properties at the same time.

[mattrick]

IMO, "Not Secure" means a lot more to the layperson than "Not Encrypted". They're trying to push HTTPS adoption by punishing websites that don't use it.

Sure "Not Encrypted" is more accurate, but not everybody is going to know what that means.

[DonHopkins]

But "secure" is what the "s" in "https" actually stands for.

[Operyl]

To the users they’re trying to target here, Not Secure makes a lot more sense than Not Encrypted I think.

[btreesOfSpring]

Not Secure: <reason0>, <reason1>, <reasonN>

[Piskvorrr]

Good. I'm very much surprised that FTP still exists in this century.

[peterwwillis]

HTTPS is not a file transfer protocol, nor is it a network service designed for transferring files. People don't realize this until they need to send several gigabytes/terabytes of files in different directories with different permissions owned by different users, and suddenly they need to implement an FTP server over HTTP. Not to mention server-to-server syncing.

FTP is still very useful, and is depended upon by tons of corporations for bulk transfers and sensitive transactions. It is trivial to add SSL to FTP, or use SFTP if your clients/servers support it.

[nashashmi]

FTP is way nicer than any of the other services that can be used.

To send someone a file, I send them a link that they can easily use to download from the FTP site.

ftp://[UserName]:[Password]@ftp.site.com/readme.txt

It also allows them to upload stuff to it too.

[takeda]

It exists because HTTP is not a good replacement for it.

It's especially mediocre when you want to download/upload multiple files like a directory with many files inside of it.

A friend recently shared with me his file collection, through OwnCloud. It was such a pain to download. Each file is a separate link. I can't use wget to pull it, because of authentication. It had some cli tools, but it was buggy and couldn't make it work. And of course no ftp. Essentially it forced me to click every single file. I couldn't even verify the files downloaded correctly.

FTP is actually great for what it does and with clients like lftp it's fairly enjoyable to use. If you want to kill it, better make a worthy alternative.

[taf2]

Hey let's integrate.

Okay want to just FTP the files over?

Sure thing

[Crontab]

I find anonymous ftp to still be useful for distributing files to users. But for personal files? No.

[LarryMade2]

FTP is still valid for larger files - mainly in the printing industry where job uploads could easily be multiple hundreds of MBs, some now use 3rd party document transfer sites but most still rely on FTP (usually with a password access)

[chrisper]

FTPS is quite slow on my gbit machine when uploading large files compared to just FTP. I think it's due to the handshake of SSL.

Next I want to see if FTP over OPENVPN is faster.

[snakeanus]

FTP nowadays is only useful for fetching resources from very old sites. Everyone I know has switched over to sftp and other ssh-based solutions.

[graphememes]

Today, reading the comments, I have learned that a lot of hacker news readers do not understand FTP.

[lousken]

does chrome even support ftps?

[forgot-my-pw]

It doesn't according to the 3rd comment in the link.

[tazeg95]

because it's a language for beginners