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Verizon Networking The Almighty Buck The Internet

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."
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Verizon Kills Free FTP Access

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  • by plover ( 150551 ) * on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @07:40AM (#37252016) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • Besides, who uses these services anyway. Anybody I know who wants a little web server just pays the $5 a month and gets a shared hosting package. You get a lot more features this way. Most Home ISP web server packages only let you serve up static files, with no scripting abilities or anything. I personally can't even believe they have the service at all.
      • It's for people who want to take that next step up from Verizon's craptacular home page.

      • by jseale ( 691367 )
        Yes, this is backwards technology, but quite popular with regional cable TV operators. One such that I know of is Insight Communications. This one covers Kentucky, southern Indiana and Southwest Ohio. Some other cable operators might still be doing this also but I don't know of any.
    • 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?

      • That would be when my UID was considered to be in the "newb" group
        • by elp ( 45629 )

          As far back as I can remember Slashdot summaries have put fox news headlines to shame.

        • 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".

    • 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

      • by plover ( 150551 ) *

        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.

        • by Raenex ( 947668 )

          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.

          • *going* to hell?

            • by Raenex ( 947668 )

              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.

              • Slashdot was doing this stuff *long* before any of those sites even existed.

                • by Raenex ( 947668 )

                  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.

      • by Zarhan ( 415465 )

        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.

    • by lm2s ( 2432822 )

      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!!

    • >>It's days like this that I miss the fine editing that CmdrTaco used to provide.

      You must be new here.

      • by treeves ( 963993 )

        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."

    • by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • I'm not 100% sure about that. About 6 months ago, I could no longer FTP to my hosting account at bluehost.com from my home computer (ISP=Verizon) but I could from work. No biggie though, I just started using SCP, which is better anyway.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      So the headline was "Verizon Kills Free FTP Access." You removed the word "free," then complained that the word "free" wasn't there.

  • ITYM:

    Verizon recently disabled FTP access for those foolish enough to use its proprietary service to build their personal websites.

  • 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?

    • Host with a free web hosting service; update your existing Verizon site to re-direct to the new location.
    • Host with a paid hosting service; update your existing Verizon site to re-direct to the new location.
    • Transition to the fluffier "Site Builder"
    • Use the "My Domain" service as stated in the article
    • Find a
    • I'm paying $4/month for database (if I wanted it), ColdFusion and secure FTP for my .org sites. So free personal web hosting that requires $6 for FTP access doesn't seem like such a good deal. It's kinda like those ads I see where something's free as long as you pay for shipping and handling. Or used books on Amazon that cost only a penny, as long as you pay for shipping and handling.
  • by Darth_brooks ( 180756 ) <{clipper377} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @08:49AM (#37252740) Homepage

    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....

    • 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

      • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        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.

        • 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.

        • because uh, fuck regular ftp.

          Actually, don't. You might catch something.

          :-p

    • My only use for that space is (was) to provide links to files which made the FTP interface for uploads extremely useful. Verizon's other tools are awkward, cumbersome, and roughly equivalent to reaching over your right shoulder with your left hand to retrieve something from your left-side back pocket. Using FTP only required a simple script.
      • by bedouin ( 248624 )

        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.

    • by jseale ( 691367 )

      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.

  • Ok, so Verizon's website builder thing is pretty lame, but if you need a place to host a small file or two it works pretty well and comes free with your service. However, previously the ONLY ways of getting data on there were FTP and their totally useless "I'll make a crappy looking website for you, you just pick how much lens flare to add!" website. They've just killed the one way that was actually somewhat useful. I know some of you are suggesting that FTP is dead and you should be using SCP instead, a
    • 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.

    • 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?

  • TRIPOD has a free subscription but it doesn't include FTP either. http://www.tripod.lycos.com/web-hosting/compare_plans.pl [lycos.com]

    Monthly $4.95 Yearly $54.45

    Citizen's Political Power in the U.S. [tripod.com]
  • Anonymous FTP is okay for personal use with data that contains no personal information I suppose, but from a corporate perspective it is a real pain to deal with companies who think we would trust software downloaded from an FTP site without MD5 hashes stored separately to compare against. It's even worse to deal with companies who think it's ok to upload log data that may contain who knows what confidential information to "password protected" FTP site. We should be beyond clear text passwords by this day
  • 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

  • Same thing happened with Time Warner cable. You used to be able to create web pages and FTP to your personal directory. Then you could only use a stupid python website generator. Then they just totally took personal web pages away. (No suprise that no one wanted a "custom" web page generated to look like it was made by a ten year old.
  • 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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