Verizon Kills Free FTP Access 130
First time accepted submitter JP205 writes "Verizon recently disabled FTP access for its Internet customers who use its proprietary service to build their personal websites. It turns out that if you want FTP access restored, Verizon is happy to grant it to you for an extra $6 a month."
Misleading summary is incomplete. (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon didn't "kill FTP access". They didn't shut down the protocol. They only shut off FTP access to their free personal web page hosting servers. That's a big difference when you're writing a headline.
It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
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It's for people who want to take that next step up from Verizon's craptacular home page.
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It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
Wait, when was this golden era of non-sensationalism on Slashdot?
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As far back as I can remember Slashdot summaries have put fox news headlines to shame.
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Funny, I don't seem to remember such a time. As far back as I can remember, Slashdot headings have been misleading; the summaries have been poorly written; and the editors were too lazy to do any actual "editing".
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It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
I kept my snark to myself during the CmdrTaco farewell love-fest last week, because it seemed a bit "too soon" for that. However, I gotta ask... what in the world are you guys talking about?!? No one's been putting "fine editing" on anything for years now. Headlines were misleading and sensationalized to draw eyeballs last month, and they still will be next month.
That is Slashdot. Most of us who love it, do so for its amazing comment community rather than its borderline whore-ish editors. If you want
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Ummm... whoosh?
6 years ago I'd have cracked the same joke about Jon Katz (and probably did.)
It's never too early for snark. I was just on vacation this weekend.
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Sometimes you have to make the sarcasm explicit. Too many people are actually claiming that things are going to hell now that Taco has left.
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*going* to hell?
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Yeah, that's the point. Slashdot has been trying to compete with Huffington Post (typical activist slants), Digg (idle), and Reddit (user submissions of blog posts) for a while now.
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Slashdot was doing this stuff *long* before any of those sites even existed.
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Maybe, but I noticed a marked uptick in the non-news items when Digg and Reddit were getting popular. I believe that's around the time that Idle was created.
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Agreed. When I find interesting topic, the best stuff is reading comments at +4. Usually there's information on what is *actually* occurring, instead of whatever the summary/linked blog/linked popularized article says.
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Verizon didn't "kill FTP access". They didn't shut down the protocol. They only shut off FTP access to their free personal web page hosting servers. That's a big difference when you're writing a headline.
It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
Shame on you for wanting the truth instead of the news!!
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>>It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.
You must be new here.
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Last week it was all "Good Luck CmdrTaco, we're going to miss you, fine job you did, thanks for everything, yada, yada, yada."
Now it's back to "lousy editors, lousy CmdrTaco, why can't we have a good editor, yada, yada, yada."
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Well, Verizon indeed didn't "kill FTP access" as you put it, but it did "kill FREE FTP access" as the title of the article puts it.
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Misquoting headline is misleading (Score:1)
So the headline was "Verizon Kills Free FTP Access." You removed the word "free," then complained that the word "free" wasn't there.
Misquoted? (Score:2)
ITYM:
Options (Score:1)
Change is never welcome by most people. We're creatures of habit.
Not sure what Verizon's rationale was; security concern with FTP, operational support, strategic decision to get rid of the free web service?
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Personal web pages? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. I bet both users were not only outraged, but they were even more infuriated to learn that geocities was gone too....
1996 called, they want their web hosting solution back.
1992 called, they want their protocol back.
1990 called, telling me I owe it royalties on this joke....
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1992 called, they want their protocol back.
1992? For FTP? It's not even that recent. 1985 for the current specification (RFC 959) [wikipedia.org], but it's first version was written as early as 1971
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I think it's more important to know, does verizon offer sftp?
because uh, fuck regular ftp. it's only good for public sites. but for those I wish it made a comeback, so fucking tired of 10 phase gui selection to find some driver.
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Nope. No SFTP access, so really this is more about just killing off personal webhosting than FTP access.
And really, if you can figure out FTP for web hosting, it's not much of a leap to just run FTP on a box at home if all you're doing is storing files. Or SSH.
Safe Sex (Score:2)
because uh, fuck regular ftp.
Actually, don't. You might catch something.
:-p
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Run a web server at home, make a desktop shortcut to the public_html folder on it, and drop files for your friends whenever they want them with no uploading required in between.
Best solution for sharing small files to a handful of people and if you enable directory listings you can link say -- 20 files at once without sending individual URLs.
obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
https://www.xkcd.com/875/ [xkcd.com]
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Wow. I bet both users were not only outraged, but they were even more infuriated to learn that geocities was gone too
Yep! It definitely looks as if Google has taken over this space with its Google Sites website. Angelfire and its brethren are pretty much gone too.
And they replaced it with...nothing (Score:2)
anon ftp still useful (Score:2)
FTP is not dead. Still useful for anonymous dowloading like for the latest Linux kernels [kernel.org]. Don't recall ever seeing an anonymous SCP transfer method.
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An incompetent tech doesn't know how to setup their servers so they decided to shut it down at the expense of end users and you start the sentence with "To be fair"?
What the heck is fair about that?
Compare to Tripod (Score:2)
Monthly $4.95 Yearly $54.45
Citizen's Political Power in the U.S. [tripod.com]
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You can get hosting at a real hosting provider for less than that, with FTP, domain name included, far more space, mailboxes, and various other perks.
http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=6761404 [1and1.com]
One step in the right direction (Score:1)
Lame decision (Score:2)
The problem for customers seems to be deciding how they are going to maintain their websites. SiteBuilder really sucks; It is hard to use, lack features and design, and only has limited options. Customers I've talked to seem to resent not having the choice of protocols and methods. Theoretically, SiteBuilder will allow you to upload your own pictures and graphics into your selected templates, but it works better in theory than in practice.
Until now, a person with a limited website account could still design
Cloned Time Warner (Score:1)
No SFTP either? (Score:2)
From looking at Verizon forums, the problem seems to be that, unlike everybody else in web hosting, they discontinued FTP without supporting SFTP as a replacement. Most hosting services now require you to use SFTP instead of FTP, and SSH instead of Telnet.
Dreamweaver can use FTP or SFTP, so people with sites big enough to need Dreamweaver have no problem with that.
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reliable, simple, unambiguous, easy to automate, low overhead method for moving any sort of files.
Re:FTP (Score:4, Insightful)
Reliable? Unless you need to go through a NAT
Simple? Nothing's as simple as connecting to one port for the control channel and then having another random port you need to connect to for a data channel and then there's the PASV/EPASV vs. Active question.
Unambiguous? Every server displays different text, I'm not even sure the prompts are the same
Easy to automate? It's a challenge-response password mechanism
Low overhead? See the "simple" rebuttal
And, oh yes, all passwords are strictly in the clear.
SCP, on the other hand, is reliable, simple, unambiguous, much easier to automate, and overhead isn't nearly the problem on modern computers as it was when you tried to get it working on a 386SX. And one more thing, it's SECURE!
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"Simple? Nothing's as simple as connecting to one port for the control channel and then having another random port you need to connect to for a data channel and then there's the PASV/EPASV vs. Active question."
So you claim it has a fault then provide the answer and say its a question? Riiight.
"Easy to automate?"
Yes. And if you don't know how to do it then you've obviously never used ftp for much of anything so your opinions are void.
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Uhh... Yes, he did. "FTP has faults X, Y, and Z; This alternative solves those faults". I don't see the problem.
And if you don't know how to do it then you've obviously never used ftp for much of anything so your opinions are void.
Don't act like an ass. I've "automated" more than a few FTP connections to pull in daily data feeds (EDI, price feeds, transactional data, etc). And every single one of them required s
Re:FTP (Score:4, Interesting)
I've "automated" more than a few FTP connections to pull in daily data feeds (EDI, price feeds, transactional data, etc). And every single one of them required slightly different syntax.
Doesn't, say, the FTP module of Python abstract that away for you?
Some servers don't like dir vs ls.
And SCP doesn't like either, as far as I can tell. That's why I prefer SFTP, automated with the aid of Paramiko, an implementation of SSH and SFTP in Python on top of PyCrypto. But not all web hosts support SSH access at all.
PASV solves one set of problems in exchange for another (cheap insecure home firewall? Great, no problems. Actually secure corporate firewall? Prepare for a day of agony, and expect it to break every time you get an update).
In what way is a cheap home firewall insecure?
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In what way is a cheap home firewall insecure?
Most home firewalls are, in their default configuration which most home users never change (they are never told they might need to), doing nothing but a subset of Network Address Translation.
While I personally wouldn't call this particularly insecure (it at least keeps out unwanted incoming connections for the most part) some people would and it is certainly less secure than a proper firewall arrnagement that polices traffic intentionally rather than just blocking outside connections due to a side effect
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So. A "good" firewall adds additional obscurity where a "cheap" firewall does not.
*yawn*
1996 called, and they want their argument back.
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So. A "good" firewall adds additional obscurity where a "cheap" firewall does not.
*yawn*
No. A good firewall doesn't offer what protection it does simply by accident as a side-effect.
With regard to FTP: a good protocol doesn't needlessly require several connections that make tracking the process less trivial, and making it less efficient to boot. If you want to keep using FTP go ahead though, its no skin off my nose. Unless you are using any service I have some responsibility for of course, in which case you'll need to use a more modern protocol or take your business elsewhere.
1996 called, and they want their argument back.
Of the two arguments, I'm not convinced that the one I agree with is the backwards one.
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blah blah blah, best practices, blah, blah, blah.
1988 called. They want to talk to you about your stance on FTP.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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That is how the modern world is supposed to work: we realise what problems we have, find better ways to perform those tasks affected by those problems, and move on. This process is usually referred to as "progress".
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Then why are we discussing it now?
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"And every single one of them required slightly different syntax"
Oh BS. I've yet to come across an ftp server than didn't except the standard rfc commands.
"For EOL "conventions", you may as well flip a coin"
Wtf are you talking about? What are these servers running on, Windows??
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Wtf are you talking about? What are these servers running on, Windows??
Among others. Windows, and VAXen, and ancient IBM mainframes, Oh My.
Modern coders have gotten spoiled by the fact that "modern" OSs (from 'doze to Linux to OS-X) all ripped off the same stock networking code from BSD-circa-1985.
The fact that you've never had the need to communicate between systems more diverse than XP-to-RHEL doesn't r
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How about "widely available and what newbies were taught to use for decades because nobody built a good, free Windows GUI for scp until much later"?
Not to mention "gets the job done." If it gets the job done, most people don't want to learn a new tool.
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I was using WinSCP in 2001. I think it was on version 2.3 then. Learning a new tool wasn't exactly a problem - it looked like Windows Exporer, so once you'd typed in your login details (once, then it saves them) you just needed to drag and drop in exactly the same way you would with WebDAV or FTP.
If my clients were using Windows, I'd probably favour WebDAV-over-HTTPS over SFTP, simply because Explorer has support for WebDAV, while they need to install a free program to use SCP / SFTP.
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Really, who uses SCP? It's clumsy to use, since it doesn't provide directory listings. You still need FTP or another protocol to provide remote listings and other file operations.
Use SFTP. It's a mush better protocol than SCP or FTP (it's not FTP over SSH!).
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If I have reliable SSH access, I rather use sshfs.
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My swiss-army-knife for file transfers both to/from remote hosts and local ones, is rsync-through-ssh (and even sometimes rsync for local file copies) - especially when updating a file or selection of files (it can be rather efficient at only sending the changed parts over) or transferring something very large (with the right options transfers ar
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Use SFTP. It's a mush better protocol than SCP or FTP (it's not FTP over SSH!).
No, it's not. It's a different tool, for different uses. I use scp all the time; if I want to copy a single file (or a group of them) from one PC to another, and I already know exactly where I want to put them, scp is easily the fastest and easiest way to do it. With the public keys already programmed into each PC, I don't even have to bother with passwords; copying a file with scp is almost as simple as a regular "cp" command
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Really, who uses SCP? It's clumsy to use, since it doesn't provide directory listings. You still need FTP or another protocol to provide remote listings and other file operations.
I use scp every single day. It's simple to use, and I don't need remote listings. I'm frequently logged into several Linux boxes (using ssh), and need to copy from one to the other. scp makes it a simple one-line operation, just as simple as a "cp" command, except I just have to add the machine name. Why do I need remote listin
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It's been fifteen years since I saw a NAT router have a problem handling FTP.
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Every HTTP server displays different text as well. Hell, every 404 page is different, yet all HTTP clients seem to know it's a 404.
Deal is, FTP has numeric response codes. The FTP client looks at those to figure out the responses, and displays the text portion for the user so they don't have to know the FTP numeric responses.
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I disagree. I find SCP to have highly significant rainbow and lollipop content.
Re:FTP (Score:5, Funny)
I'm colorblind and have diabetes, you insensitive clod!
Re:FTP (Score:5, Funny)
I use rsync, which practically shits rainbows.
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We don't want know what you're transferring with it.
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Yes, but the additional sunshine does mean that everything involvedis wonderful.
It has the Lesley Gore seal of approval!
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I think more importantly, universal.
There have been much better alternates (sftp for instance) for a long time. I suspect few people on slashdot still use FTP unless they really have to (no alternatives offered). That said, just about every web host still supports FTP, and all the click-n-drool web dev tools have built in FTP clients. It's still the lowest common denominator for newbies to get their files on the web.
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To each their own I guess ;p
I actually find sftp more convenient, as there is no real server setup (assuming you are already running ssh), no annoying firewall configuration, and you don't need to specify a password every time (assuming you have ssh keys set up). The added security is just a (nice) bonus.
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I suspect few people on slashdot still use FTP unless they really have to (no alternatives offered).
A few factors (ssh server config, client CPU, server CPU, etc.) can make SFTP orders of magnitude slower than FTP, especially if the network link is fast.
For updating a website over your Internet connection, it probably won't matter, but when transferring 100GB over LAN, it can make a huge difference.
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And completely without anything resembling real security. It even subverts *other* security by being difficult to route through a firewall.
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Purely out of morbid curiosity, what firewall are you using that doesn't have application level support for FTP?
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what firewall are you using that doesn't have application level support for FTP?
Just about any non-windows firewall, including network firewalls.
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Purely out of morbid curiosity, what firewall are you using that doesn't have application level support for FTP?
Every firewall that I don't personally control.
People use *some* file transfer protocol (Score:1)
No alternative has been offered in place of FTP, such as the more secure SFTP.
From TFA.
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Yeh, you're right, scp, sftp, rsync, none of these tools exist ;)
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ftp still has it's place
On a plinth in a museum?
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Of course people still use FTP. A lot of us want the master copy of our web site to be on our own machine and our own backups. But Website Hosts have these neat GUIs to automate upload? I have not the slightest inclination to manually update 800 files four times a year. I doubt you would either. Most Website Hosts (Google excepted) support FTP. But there are better ways? Probably. But I have my hands full fixing stuff that is actually broken.
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But I have my hands full fixing stuff that is actually broken
Was that stuff broken by the script kiddie who sniffed your FTP password?
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I have a simple server for a simple purpose hosted by a third party that requires FTP or web style uploads. Look, it may not be the best method, but I don't stop beside the Amish buggies I pass and shout "WTF" at them.
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I maintain about 20 of them and WILL NOT USE FTP.
SFTP is what anyone who is competent uses. even frigging Go-daddy has it.
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They're not providing SFTP. They're not providing anything, from what I read, other than a "site builder"-type software package (which probably can't work with custom files). Basically, they're holding customers' sites hostage to a price increase.