Recently I noticed a lot of posts about ftp despite it being antiquated and insecure and harder to setup than ssh/sftp/scp/sshfs ?

FTP may be old, but that does not make it antiquated.

It's popular because, when security is not an issue, say for publicly available files, it works well and is reliable.

Anytime I have a choice, I use ssh and scp. I agree they're much, much better than telnet and ftp.

But my company's embedded products are running an old OS that don't support ssh, but they do support telnet and ftp. And we only access them via private networks, so security isn't a problem.

Maybe the posts you saw were for people with a similar situation.

Yeah my job place has old ibm mainframes that can't serve ssh so there are many jcl that are written with people's usernames (or worse: system id's) and password.

Speed... Ftp is much faster than sftp (which is FTP through SSH).. When security isn't a concern (say for a public FTP or one available only through a secure VPN) than setting a ftp is a much better alternative.

it is theoretically faster since none of the packets have encryption data in them however i think real world practical use is unnoticeable (if it were significant then everyone would disable wep/wpa/wpa2 on their wireless routers).

I see FTP as antiquated and suggest HTTP for public distribution of files.

http://cr.yp.to/ftp.html
http://cr.yp.to/ftp/security.html

Bingo! Newer doesn't mean better but sometimes you need features that exist only in new or only in old.
Watch this humor about cell phone reunion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD8OcPGScRU

Remember also that "ftp" is just-fine on a secure internal network, or over a VPN connection. When used in conjunction with technologies like "rsync," it is even more useful. As long as the network or the channel is known to be secure, further encryption is unnecessary.

Depends on the data and use. If someone posted an old ftp site open to common users, anyone with almost any OS under the sun could access it. You'd only secure files that you want to protect.

While most sites allow either http, https or ftp or even sftp it is up to the user to choose what they want.

I'd agree that in some cases http could be faster under some proxies/qos or other schemes that restrict or increase some traffic over another. ftp gets booted in some situations to very slow speeds. Hey, I can wait.

Some ftp could more easily resume.

I just had to comment that this is nonsense, for fear anyone reading it might think it is true. sftp is a completely different protocol from ftp. They are unrelated apart from similar sounding names and they fact that their primary purposes are for transferring files.

sftp is not FTP through SSH. That would be "FTP over SSH", which is completely different.

For read-only public file distribution, which is by far its most common use, it works very well. In fact, I don't see any reason to switch to anything else for this purpose. For all other purposes, yes you should be using something else.

The best protocol for public file distribution is not FTP and it's not HTTP. It's Bittorrent.

Really ? Well, try to estimate how many times you have gotten torrents that have no seeders. Also, take two files, one hosted on bittorrent and one hosted on ftp. Which one, in general would be faster to download ? This of course has everything to do with how many seeders there are, and there are usually few.

Just as an example, when a new Slackware comes out I do try to use bittorrent to download it. However, every single time, I have had to cancel the bittorrent, download it from one of the ftp servers that is hosting it, and then out of generosity I seed the file I got from ftp using bittorrent.

IMO, bittorrent cannot get any more pitiful.

If it's only you hosting the file what's the benefit of Bittorrent?