That Sad Old FTP Thing
The short list of real-life TCP ports we looked at on Setting Up contained, among other things, FTP, the classic File Transfer Protocol. FTP is a relic of the early Internet, when experiments were the norm and security was not really on the horizon in any modern sense. FTP actually predates TCP/IP,[15] and it is possible to track the protocol's development through more than 50 RFCs. After more than 30 years, FTP is both a sad old thing and a problem child, emphatically so for anyone trying to combine FTP and firewalls. FTP is an old and weird protocol, with a lot to dislike. The most common points against it are these:
Passwords are transferred in the clear.
The protocol demands the use of at least two TCP connections (control ...
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