I dunno man, the amount of people who say "FTP server" with a straight face, not realizing that credentials are transmitted in plaintext, is alarming.

An FTP server is perfectly fine for anonymous logins, assuming it was configured server side to be running as a low permissioned user.

But yes, once you start taking user credentials, you need to move to something like FTPS or SFTP (urgh... double standards).

But authentication goes both ways.

Yeah, I generally give people the benefit of the doubt on that one, given that the new way is sftp... FTP is still a reasonable shorthand.

It doesn't help that you have either FTPS or SFTP depending on the platform. I call it FTP as a generalization, but if I ever saw it as an actual FTP implementation I'm outta there.

Yeah, but e-mail. The overwhelming masses of people still use it for transmitting the most important docs in plaintext.

And people still call TLS SSL. Habits form, technologies change.

From the way the article describes the Minecraft community development, I thought it was possible that the choice of telnet was deliberate. It's easier to log in to, for one- no key configuration. And while the connection is insecure, I would bet a lot that nothing of value can be accessed from the people actually telnetting in- I bet that all non-game related write permissions are limited to SSH users. And if they are hacked, then they are (probably) inconvenienced, think about their passwords, and really understand why people use this thing SSH instead of telnet.

It seems pretty genius to me.