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Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

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Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Insecure" is the new "is a witch". Too coarse to be used as a valid argument.

Alright. It's not encrypted and not origin-verifiable then. I think we all knew that though... anyway it should be abundantly clear at this point that no one should be using protocols that can trivially be MITM'ed to access anything over the internet.

>...anyway it should be abundantly clear at this point that no one should be using protocols that can trivially be MITM'ed to access anything over the internet.

This is a specious argument because HTTP/HTTPS is regularly (and legally) MITM'ed[0, 1].

If we shouldn't use anything that can be MITM'ed, shouldn't we just shut down the internet? Wouldn't that stop MITM attacks permanently-like? What about phones? Or letters? Or even talking? Where does this scare-tactic of the MITM "boogey-man" end (for you)?

[0] - https://www.symantec.com/products/proxy-sg-and-advanced-secu...

[1] - https://www.occrp.org/en/daily/10431-kazakh-officials-delay-...

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#242

There are 100,000s of resources on publicly accessible FTP servers and the removal of direct access to these files via one of the worlds most used browsers is major blow for information storage and retrieval on the internet. It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if…

Nah. Average consumers almost never touch ftp anymore. I'm a tech pro and even I haven't used ftp in years. Having ftp servers accessible from a browser is a fairly useless luxury at this point. Dedicated ftp clients are very easy to come by for anyone.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#243
post #94

I know for a fact that HP distributes software and drivers over FTP files that they link to on their website. FTP isn't used much anymore, but IMO/IME, it's still nice to have for those rare times when you come across a file that you need to download and it's served over FTP.

Same for supermicro - your drivers/firmware is on ftp

I couldn't find an FTP link for drivers/firmware on Supermicro (or HP). I only tried a few random products out of curiosity, but: are you sure? :)

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Websockets use HTTP only for the initial handshake. The rest of the channel uses the Websocket protocol.

Yes. That protocol is effectively part of HTTP now.

  The WebSocket Protocol is an independent TCP-based protocol.  Its only relationship to HTTP is that its handshake is interpreted by HTTP servers as an Upgrade request.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455#section-1.7

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#246
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one really uses FTP to transmit anything secret or confidential. Most of the time the password to that FTP server is just "guest" and the same file can also be retrieved by HTTP without authentication.

I guess many old website maintenance workflows still rely on ftp'ing HTML and assets to the web server (though not through browsers). I personally have recommended clients to switch over to ssh/scp 15 years ago if they can help it but their hosting package might not support it. The optimal, made-for-purpose protocol for this use case is WebDAV but I'm not sure it's still supported out-of-the-box by all major OSs and/…

You know what is a made for purpose protocol for transferring files? The File Transfer Protocol.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#247

I know for a fact that HP distributes software and drivers over FTP files that they link to on their website. FTP isn't used much anymore, but IMO/IME, it's still nice to have for those rare times when you come across a file that you need to download and it's served over FTP.

The FTP link can still use xdg-open or whatever the local equivalent is to spawn the user's FTP app and connect to that URL. I think that's how most URLs with unsupported (by the browser) protocols are handled nowadays anyway.

What average user has a ftp app installed?

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#248
post #109

After this change, will Chrome still be able to support FTP through extensions?

Given that extensions are just JavaScript code and they constantly restrict what they can do, I doubt it.

Extensions can communicate with a native helper app actually. This looks like an FTP capable extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sftp-client/jajcol...

Not sure if it uses a proprietary proxy though.

Re: Google Plans to Deprecate FTP URL Support in Chrome

#250
post #242

There are 100,000s of resources on publicly accessible FTP servers and the removal of direct access to these files via one of the worlds most used browsers is major blow for information storage and retrieval on the internet. It is obvious that the next FTP related headline we see from Google is when (not, if) they drop FTP links from all Google search results. There's no point them listing FTP urls in the results if…

Nah. Average consumers almost never touch ftp anymore. I'm a tech pro and even I haven't used ftp in years. Having ftp servers accessible from a browser is a fairly useless luxury at this point. Dedicated ftp clients are very easy to come by for anyone.

Do dedicated ftp clients include crawling and indexing?
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