I recently had a discussion with our security advisor at work, about
FTP being replaced by HTTP and SCP. Some people would like to replace
"insecure" FTP with "modern" services like SCP and HTTP (something
along the lines of "we don't do anonymous FTP, stick the file on a web
page instead"), and argue that they're safer and there's no loss of
functionality. I'm not so sure. For example, FTP understands the
difference between a unix-style "stream of bytes" file, and a
structured one such as might be found under VMS (or any of several
other OSs) -- and can deal with the difference.
I don't have an easy way to test this, so I don't know if web browsers
or programs like wget can do the right thing, or indeed if servers such
as Apache can, or what happens with SCP -- but it occurs to me that it
might matter in the context of classic computing.
Anyone?
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Received on Thu May 27 2004 - 18:36:42 BST