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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

If you look at "old" internet: fidonet telnet bitnet ftp fsp wais netnews whois++ gopher relaynet ... i mean irc is one of the only ones that is still used, and mostly as it was 35 years ago. Pretty impressive.

People love knocking on IRC but people are still on it, still using it...

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HTTP is also still somewhat popular.

But, seriously, that got me curious. There are many protocols from that early era that are still with us today. NTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, BGP, SNMP, NFS, ICMP. If you allow the 1990's as counting as "old" we can add SSH and SSL, DHCP, LDAP.

TCP

I feel the need to be pedantic, but I do not mean it to be rude.

What we sometimes call SSL is not the same SSL as back then. That said, TLS was released in 1999, so it just barely makes the cut. :D

Telnet still very popular with embedded. SSH is not a spring chicken either.

Finger is still there too [1]:

$ finger a@l3x.in

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49342472

Actually, its just inertia and lack of reliable forum hosting, the actual "killer app" that replaced volatile and unarchivable chat content, but no one learned from it and people flocked to Discord, which is even more hostile to archiving/scanning chat history.

I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become. Especially when so many tech companies will scan and download same content countless times without single care of damage or cost the cause...

Just imagine hosting that history on your instance for users and then some vibecoder without care in his work starts scanning it automatically every 5 seconds just in case it might have changed...

> I am starting to wonder is archiving or scanning history even possible with how hostile internet has become.

Future generations are going to be looking at a historical black hole.

Yeah, but the major upgrades for things like telnet and ftp were adding appropriate encryption layers and improved authentication to include things like certificates. IRC shoehorned those into the connections awkwardly but it's still not often mandatory and registration is painful.

Also usenet is still very popular but mostly used for file sharing.

Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.

I don’t believe it was or continually is limited to text only, but I do believe we had netiquette back then which helped to reconsider spamming internet with media and other decorators, only to have it all forgotten 72h later

Still is, but a bit empty. https://eternal-september.org/

Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.

The eternal September complaint comes to mind, but even eternal September was a jolly walk in the park compared to what modern social media has turned into.

> Usenet could exist only because people could behave, unfortunately. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of shitfest Usenet as a social media platform would turn into today.

Spam filtering has improved a lot since the Usenet days, but even if it hadn't we had killfiles to deal with the spam and filtering out harrasers. Doing this today would be even easier with the help of LLMs.

> Yes. usenet, however, used to be social media. It was like text-only reddit.

Except, unlike Reddit, it wasn't centralized nor owned by a single corporation.

Usenet users did not have to obey the rules and whims of any corporation and there was thriving ecosystem of feature rich, free and open Usenet clients.

I really miss having my own killfiles and regex search abilities that were common on Usenet clients, but is missing from the Reddit clients and its web UI.

ActivityPub is essentially this in "modern" times with "modern" sensibilities (e.g. accounting for low power mobile devices that are going to hold open only a single connection and query for posts.) You can pretty trivially killfile whatever you'd like too. I vibecoded a super basic AP "client" that just speaks AP vocabulary to fetch posts from users I have in a JSON file.

it took me too long to realize ActivityPub is basically email.

I guess we only have three protocols, email, irc and BitTorrent.

Heh yeah that's a great way to put it. Email and Usenet are very similar; they both use RFC 5322 Message Format messages as their envelopes for data.

What about the registration you find so painful? It takes a single command to register a nick, if that's what you mean.

In his defence, its a single command, if you know the command

This, which is not uniform across servers, and has more work if you want to do certificate-based auth. Additionally getting a nick cloak is good opsec and also extremely not uniform.

The entire premise of cloaks as optional seems like broken UX to me. I'd like to see a new version make your connections details private by default.

Also funny watching peopel mistype the command in the wrong window and expose their "password for everything" to everyone in the chat.

I am quite used to IRC and would still always start with `/msg nickserv help` to be safe. I think the UX is okay but I wouldn't make the single command claim myself. It's similar to hopping on a unix-like machine in the wild and you don't know if you have GNU/BSD/busybox utils and there are some slight differences, so you either hope it works or check the man page quick.

To be honest, I've never encountered an IRCd where it is NOT a single command through NickServ. Setting up SASL authentication takes another single command, as far as I know. Of course, this does not involve certificate issuance through openssl command line. As for cloaking, one typically needs to ask the staffers. In Libera the process is automatic if you just want the user cloak, but let's say it's two commands: joining a channel, and saying "!cloakme" or whatever. :-) Glad to see another fellow IRCer, by the way. o/

FTP is still used quite a bit. For what it’s useful for, nothing has come close to replacing it.

like in enterprise? the browsers stopped shipping with ftp support I think 5 years ago.

You might be surprised to learn there are dedicated ftp clients.

sarcasm?

Don't know of a client with that name, but there are plenty of others.

Hosting files to be downloaded via web browser isn’t what it’s useful for. If you’re going to do that, you might as well use… a web server.

FTP is useful for bidirectional file exchange over the Internet. There are other protocols, but they all have drawbacks. SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access. SMB and NFS don’t really work so well over the Internet and are a pain to configure for multiple users. For setting up accounts dedicated to transferring files, you really can’t beat FTP (or really FTPS, which is just FTP over SSL).

> SFTP can be used for similar functionality, but it requires users to have SSH access.

Security-wise you set it not to run commands (and maybe chroot) and you're done, right? And difficulty-wise isn't granting SSH access very similar to FTP access?

I don't understand the issue.

SSH requires a system account. FTP access can be granted and revoked via a database, or even a text file.

That depends on your server.

But in the most common case a "system account" is a line in two text files, isn't it?

It’s way more of a hassle than that. Things like per-user chroot, managing permissions, restricting access to port 22… all much more difficult with SFTP. With an FTP server like vsftpd, you can just create virtual users and assign them home directories, then everything is just owned by the user running the ftp daemon process.

Those things don't require noticeably more code to automate with SFTP than with FTP, or need a more complicated interface. Maybe nobody has written that code to make the management easy? Someone that cares about security should then.

Google suggests that some servers can do SFTP with virtual users.

FTP is perfectly secure though when run over SSL (FTPS), so why not use the protocol that’s already designed for file transfer with the server that makes it easy?

IME it was because you already have ssh setup.

It's secure if you do that but a lot of entities don't do that.

I don't mind FTPS, I just don't think FTPS versus SFTP is a big difficulty difference.

HTTPS has largely replaced it. Pretty much all files uploaded or downloaded from the internet is going to be done via HTTPS and not FTP.

Only if you ignore the banking industry.

Fair point, but I would assume the AWS S3 by itself is bigger than the FTP/SFTP traffic globally including banks. No idea if it’s true, and I’m not sure we can get reliable stats on this

SFTP? Don't confuse it with FTP or FTPS - SFTP is a different protocol which runs on top of SSH.

They are not confused. A lot of companies still use FTP internally and for B2B. Many people would be very uncomfortable if they knew how much companies including banks, payment systems, etc... and governments still depended on FTP and clear text authentication. That's even before broaching the subject of which of the applications and daemons in use are being actively maintained.

What do you mean, "for what it’s useful for"? For me, WebDAV has replaced FTP where SFTP hasn't.

Has that caught on? I last used it 15 years ago and it was great but I haven't seen it anywhere

Absolutely. Windows, macOS, and major FLOSS desktop environments support it. Nemo (Cinnamon) and Dolphin (KDE) open WebDAV URLs as directories. Total Commander for Android has a WebDAV plugin.

You can set up a server easily with Apache, including an FTP-style inbox. Here is my config: https://github.com/dbohdan/apache-2.4-webdav. I don't recommend nginx for WebDAV. My main HTTP server, Caddy, has gained WebDAV support since I published this configuration, but I haven't used it in anger.

The main place I see FTP used is on modded video game consoles. 3DS, Switch, PS3, basically all of them get some FTP program early on so you don't need to move a flash drive or SD card back and forth anymore. On PCs and my phone I use sftp or rsync since ssh is pretty much everywhere and becomes very comfortable with a config file with aliases and keys set up.

Everything decentralized will keep being used. Stuff is sticky.

More illuminating: To what (relative) extend? And what's the trajectory?

Looking at Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F03t2s%2C%2Fg%2F11...

I started on the internet in 1991... used ftp, usenet, email, irc, telnet, gopher.

gopher is the one that seems really dead. ftp is still pretty common, usenet is still active (though maybe just for "Linux ISOs"), telnet lost its main use which was for remote shells and muds/moos but still use it from time to time for random devices that support it. IRC only had 400 or so active people on it at any given time. I haven't really used it in the last decade. The web destroyed gopher almost instantly.

There is still a niche community of people running Gopher servers. I wrote a small basic implementation of a Gopher server in Python before for fun once and it hosted a Gopher hole for a few years. I doubt even one person actually looked it at besides me, but the RFC is simple and can be implemented pretty fast.

what about SMTP?

I thought of that ... you could put it in the list but I wouldn't unless you're talking cron. I mean when I started it was like mail bob@froggy.ucla.edu and bob would open up pine or emacs and not get any spam or have to do anything crazy and we'd have a conversation.

that modality is long dead. we still have email but it's not that same ... I however could take mirc from like 1995 and still use everything.

But as IRC has a social network component, it's more of a social thing than anything inherent to IRC.

I wonder if the LOC Gopher is still around; I used to use it as a "jumping off" point.

I'm here looking for other telenet (not telnet) oldheads, finding nobody.

COBOL is still used 50 years later.

COBOL is definitely a hallmark of this type of argument.

reminds me that fortran has a modern website: https://fortran-lang.org/

Logo too!

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