What you need: FTP Rush
Time required: 30 minutes
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is as old as the internet. It’s the process – or protocol – by which websites are uploaded to servers and files can be downloaded in return.
It’s a very robust system that works on the principle of clients and servers. Your computer is the ‘client’, which manages all of the file transfers, while the remote machine is the ‘server’ that acts on the client’s requests (or instructions) to retrieve, move, or store a particular file.
It’s not only used for uploading the contents of websites, either. You may have used FTP to download software – perhaps without realising it – because web browsers supported it.
Doing so was a simple matter of replacing the http:// or https:// at the start of a web address with ftp://, which the remote server would interpret as a request to access the content it hosted in a different way.
If it was configured to act as an FTP server as well as a regular webwould switch to the relevant protocol. This would usually result in a login window appearing, because accessing a server via FTP typically gives the user more control over it (and its contents) than when you access it using regular web-browsing protocols.
