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Hi Keith, From: Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On 11/18/20 6:00 AM, Roman Danyliw wrote: As I responded to Toerless [1], the primary users of FTP (by volume) don't appear to be disadvantaged: The issue is not about the "primary" users (by volume). (Remember, traffic volume is not an indicator of importance.) This is an accessibility issue. Would you consider it acceptable to deny access to IETF documents to sight- or hearing-impaired
persons because "the primary users... don't appear to be disadvantaged"? If not, why is it acceptable to deny access to those who cannot use crypto? [Roman] The IETF should definitely try to ensure that there is pervasive access to its information. Toerless asked the same question [1]. He was wondering if current FTP access was bridging access to other communities. ==[ snip ]== Per the usage data [1], the 85th percentile of traffic comes from entities that don't strongly suggest they would mirror for unique access: ** a dynamic IP address in a German ISP ** the proxy of a Fortune 100 company ** a Canadian IT services company ** a large US search engine company ** a leading Japanese research university ++ ** website of a not-so-popular programming language ** a small Swedish software product company ** a small, several person US consulting company ==[ snip ]== [Roman] I’m no expert in accessibility technology, but what’s the basis to link the “sight- or hearing-impaired persons” population with FTP usage. Is there accessibility technology of which we are aware that relies on FTP? [Roman] What accessibility issues is FTP solving? I don't think rsync is an acceptable substitute for FTP (valuable though rsync is) for several reasons:
[Roman] I wasn’t suggesting that rsync is a substitute of FTP. Rsync + https can cover FTP use cases (unless using encryption in the https is the problem; however, I’m still unclear on why using https rather than http presents a problem when accessing IETF
assets). (a) it's not that widely known and mostly known in the Unix/Linux worlds; [Roman] So the belief is that most FTP users are coming from Windows? Rsync across all platform strikes me a niche. (b) people looking for a way to access individual files may not stumble on rsync because it's generally a mirroring solution;
[Roman] Agreed. However, as discussed with Toerless [1] there is little evidence that “stumbling” or as he called it “search/find” is actually happening via FTP. If this use case of interest, “https://www.ietf.org/ietf-ftp/” provides a very accessible
“stumbling” all with a tool (browser) built into all end-user operating systems. You’ve noted that “traffic volume isn’t importance” but without relying on usage data of how the system is used now we’re reduced to conjuncture and speculation of who our users
are and might be. (c) it's not really designed to permit single file access even though it can be used that way;
[Roman] Agreed. It would be awkward to use rsync for that. However, HTTPS seems ideal. (d) a lot of people don't know that rsync access to IETF documents even exists or how to use it, and (given that http access is already cut off) may have no way of discovering it;
[Roman] Well, they could look at
https://www.ietf.org/standards/ids/internet-draft-mirror-sites/ or https://tools.ietf.org/.
(e) support for rsync is not integrated into browsers (though if browser vendors are also crippling ftp and http URLs that point may be moot). [Roman] Right, but browsers could use HTTPS to get absolutely everything that is currently in FTP.
Roman [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/py_9b486x8x2io6d5dAb3FAgNng/ |
