How do you mean, SFTP is a hack that suffers from all the same problems? SFTP is a new protocol, it's not the same as FTP. It doesn't concern itself with data port nonsense, and while it doesn't offer authentication or secure transfers in itself, there is - at least to my knowledge - no SFTP solution available that doesn't perform SFTP via an underlying mechanism for secure auth/transfer.
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How do you mean, SFTP is a hack that suffers from all the same problems? SFTP is a new protocol, it's not the same as FTP. It doesn't concern itself with data port nonsense, and while it doesn't offer authentication or secure transfers in itself, there is - at least to my knowledge - no SFTP solution available that doesn't perform SFTP via an underlying mechanism for secure auth/transfer.
I suspect the GP was referring to FTP over SSL, which is an ugly abomination with few redeeming features.
In this case that's FTPS (FTP over SSL), not SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol)