Is anyone aware of any anonymous ftp sites that have magic to download? I accidentally bumped into one yesterday that had a treasure trove of material (books and videos). Just wondering if there were any others?

That's the first I heard the term "anonymous ftp sites" since the '90s! Back when telnet, irc, and newsgroups WERE "the internet." *Before* AOL. Compuserve! All text based! No GUI! All through a 300 "baud" modem! Do you use a VPN to anonymize yourself before you connect to that anonymous ftp site? Seriously, I am curious about the magical content of your post. You mean anyone who is interested, whether they are a magician or not, can download stuff from this anonymous ftp site and all they have to do is find it, have an application to access it, and have any idea what the term "anonoymous ftp" means?! Just "joshing" you slightly. No kid who hasn't "paid his dues" is likely to find this site.

I notice you're not sharing the name or IP of the site you found...come on...

I want to make sure that I didn't open someone's backdoor that was accidentally left open. I thought it was all public domain stuff but now I'm not really sure. I need to investigate more. If it's legit, then I will post the info. If not, then the right thing to do is notify the owner his back door is open and delete the material I downloaded.

A protocol is just a set of rules to follow. Here is a pretty good definition of the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Be sure to read down to Anonymous FTP and also read Differences from HTTP which is what we all use when downloading single files from web pages. If you have lot of info to download, then FTP is more efficient and easier to manage as directory substructure are downloaded too. The site I spoke about had over 500 files so FTP was more efficient to use. It worked like Magic!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol