[klodolph]

Yeah, I'm not buying it. I'm an end-user of SSH and I've experienced WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED or all sorts of bizarre problems with authentication just failing for reasons that took me hours to diagnose. That, and configuring servers to reject password authentication, converting private keys between the different formats expected by different clients, the unhelpful errors like "Permission denied (publickey)." which actually means "you typed your password in wrong" but Telnet will actually tell you that your password is wrong. How many users have discovered that after upgrading SSH that their known_hosts file is now hashed?

The protocol itself is a total mess. Having implemented servers for the Telnet protocol, I can say that Telnet is a little bit of a mess, but SSH is a total nightmare by comparison.

You're right though, that if you look at a very tiny slice of SSH then it almost looks like SSH is simpler than Telnet, once you've gone through the work of generating a key pair, securing the private key, and installing the public key on your server.

[MaulingMonkey]

And if you're going to cherry pick tiny slices, I'd rather pick the slice:

"SSH lets me communicate with a server securely, more simply than via Telnet."

By the same vein, HTTPS is "simpler" than HTTP in this regard.

Ditto for many possible BGP replacements.

[klodolph]

That seems like wordplay, to me. Does a car make it "simpler" to travel 60 miles an hour down the freeway, compared to walking?

SSH is more complex and more secure than Telnet.