[mbelshe]

Nobody questions that a secure protocol is not readable text :-)

I fundamentally believe the protocol has to be server authenticated and encrypted always. We've seen breach after breach of user privacy and the desire for governments to crack down on its citizens has no bound. We simply have to encrypt. Once we do that, text is off the table, and it doesn't really matter if it is binary or not.

Of course, we need much better tools for managing the encryption, I'm not a believer that the status quo is adequate in any way.

[drdaeman]

TLS is just a layer, which replaces `telnet` with `openssl s_client`.

[mbelshe]

Alright, but that is just theory. The reason you'd want a text protocol is so that humans could read it. Once you secure the protocol, you can't read it without a machine to help you.

[drdaeman]

Well, by the same reasoning I "can't" easily talk HTTP because I can't talk TCP, IP and 802.3 - they're all binary.

This is exactly why I wrote "high-level protocols". With just a telnet client I can talk HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, IRC and so on. And the machine just needs to handle lowel-level details.