Creeva’s World 2.0

The IETF has main­tained the RFC data­base which defines Inter­net pro­to­cols into the nitty gritty sec­tions that allows other indi­vid­u­als to imple­ment them.  This is all great in the­ory the prob­lem is some pro­to­cols out live their use­ful­ness.  The prob­lem is the inse­cu­rity and unfea­si­bil­ity of these pro­to­cols remain­ing in exis­tence com­pro­mises design that should be far more stream­lined and ele­gant.    With­out fur­ther ado here is my top 10.

1.  FTP

Yes even I use ftp since my host­ing provider has made this the only effi­cient method of get­ting groups of files on to my host­ing page.   A bet­ter sce­nario would be an SSH tun­nel or a full web­DAV imple­men­ta­tion that allowed me access.   Back when I was doing fire­wall tech sup­port FTP and explain­ing to peo­ple the dif­fer­ence between active FTP and pas­sive FTP.  Here is part of the snip­pet I used to send to cus­tomer to under­stand at a high level:

In pas­sive mode the com­puter sends out two data streams – one to request which data to down­load and another to actu­ally down­load the data on a ran­dom port.   In active mode the com­puter sends out a data stream request­ing the data – then the remote com­puter con­nects in on a ran­dom port to the requester.

Now  FTP has a bit of use­ful­ness left in since I myself admit­ted to using it, so where is the com­plaint?  My com­plaint a mod­ern pro­to­col should be able to make a con­nec­tion and trans­fer files with­out requir­ing two ports, a data port and a con­trol port.   This causes havoc on a fire­wall espe­cially in active mode.   They have tried to shoe­horn in encryp­tion as an after thought but this has issues tra­vers­ing proxy fire­wall since the proxy fire­wall has no idea what the data port is going ot be since the con­nec­tion is encrypted.   Please move on to HTTP for down­load­ing across the web, or bit­tor­rent, or Web­DAV — lot’s of mod­ern pro­to­cols could be used to address this instead of try­ing to fix FTP.

2. NFS

I wrote my dia­tribe about NFS here — I have no rea­son to rehash it twice in one day.

3.  Gopher

Gopher was the pro­to­col that pre­dated mod­ern web browsers.   Granted I had a grand old time on gopher hosts back in my col­lege days and later crawl­ing through the Inter­net from the library’s card cat­a­log com­put­ers, but enough is enough.  Gopher has no rel­e­vance or use­ful­ness in todays inter­net.    I still see a strong point for the lynx web browser com­pared to what I could ever fathom using gopher again — HTTP won get over it.