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.