full-disclosure - Why is IRC still around?

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From: stephane.nasdrovisky at paradigmo.com (stephane nasdrovisky)
Subject: Why is IRC still around?

Micheal Espinola Jr wrote:

>Is SMTP bad?  Yes.
>
>Why?  Because they are simple and basic protocol  implementations
>  
>
Are or were ? smtp supports tls for example (I dropped irc because I 
have very little knowledge about it).

>Not that they aren't efficient and easy, but
>they certainly have their shortcomings in terms of security and AAA.
>  
>
smtp supports both plaintext (login/password) and tls/certificate 
authentications. Configuration is not a technology issue but a sysadmin 
issue.

>We need to move forward with technology.  Or would you rather be like
>Microsoft - and attempt to be backward compatible for all-time - and
>continue to use products that have fundamental flaws in them?
>
smtp is backward compatible with fossile like technology (sendmail comes 
to mind as it have a 'good' bugs record) but also 21th century 
technology aware (s/mime, tls).
Much could be said against protocols such as rpc, ftp, telnet, iiop, 
http, ... but some/most of them are also supporting some somewhat new 
technology (encryption, authentication, ...) some of them do not add 
much value when used over the internet (rpc comes to mind) these are 
more lan protocols.
Microsoft don't try to be backward compatible: w2k is not backward 
compatible with nt or dos, even xp sp2 is not backward compatible with 
xp sp1:-)