Interesting, not unexpected.

Interesting, not unexpected.

Posted Feb 13, 2008 23:35 UTC (Wed) by jd (guest, #26381)
In reply to: Interesting, not unexpected. by drag
Parent article: DNS Inventor Warns of Next Big Threat (Dark Reading)

SMTP is not that great, but if you're only addressing security then SMTP over SSL is perfectly good. If you want to replace SMTP altogether, then the most comprehensive e-mail messaging protocol in existance has to be X.400, which contains all kinds of features that SMTP-based e-mail users would just drool over. E-mail isn't the problem, vanilla SMTP is.

Replacing FTP is easy. SCP is the usual alternative. RSync over a secure transport is another popular candidate. I've even seen people distribute binaries over Subversion. FSP (connectionless FTP-like protocol) never really took off, but that's probably as much because nobody provided content using it. For interactive downloads, you could use something like Gopher. Again, if the issue is only security, then SFTP is perfectly good.

A lot of the issues with TCP/IP were addressed in IPv5 (I think that's what TUBA got allocated) and IPv6, but again content is limited. C'mon, it's easy to complain about protocols, but if everybody just continues to use what they hate in preference to something they would logically want, nobody is going to believe the complaints. I consider some of the groups who use alternatives as being, well, over-the-top, but I respect them deeply nonetheless because they make a sincere effort.

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