It's nice to not see C being blamed for once! ... Just good old lack of reasoning (which is most C's codebase downfall, agreeably).
It's also not DNS!
Or Windows, for a change!
The Day the Telnet Died
141–150 of 414 posts
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many things I want to say in reply to this. So I’ll bullet point them: * yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet. * there are a million telnet clients out in the world. And ones far better than the default OS one. Apple not shipping one standard is not the end of the world or really anything more than a mild inconvenience for the small handful of people wh…
> yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet. No, you already own this capital equipment. It's the laptops running macOS that are ephemeral and disposable. I don't care for excuses or workarounds; why did they do it? It was an explicit decision whilst leaving a lot more—arguably more useless—garbage in. Every OS that removed telnet did so for a symbolic reason, not bec…
It seems rather typical for Apple. The removal of the headphone jack obsoleted thousands of consumer devices.
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#143Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#144So Telnet as a client is not dead though, right? A long time ago, I used to use the Telnet client to talk to SMTP servers (on port 25) and send spoofed emails to friends for fun. With port blocking widening in scope, I’ve long believed that we would one day have every service and protocol listening on port 443. Since all other ports are being knocked off in the name of security, we’ll end up having one port that make…
None of this affects the use of telnet the client program nor the ability to run a telnetd on your own host (but do be sure it's patched!). What's happened is that global routing on the internet (or big chunks of it, it's not really clear) has started blocking telnet's default port to protect presumably-unpatched/unpatchable dinosaur systems from automated attack. So you can no longer (probably) rely on getting to a…
> started blocking telnet's default port
But that's 23 and smtp is 25.
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#145So eleven years ago someone put a backdoor in the Telnet daemon. Who? Where's the commit?
https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/commit/fa3245ac8c28...
That link goes to a page full of random garbage. No commits there to be seen.
Apparently the owners of that website don't like my choice of user agent, and have decided to punish me accordingly.
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Telnet is used in legacy, IoT, embedded, and low-level industrial hardware. It's also intentionally enabled on devices where automation was written for telnet and it wasn't easy to switch to ssh. If you investigate most commercial uses of ssh, the security is disabled or ignored. Nobody verifies host keys, and with automation where hosts cycle, you basically have to disable verification as there's no easy way around…
How do you automate, for example, "HTTPS over websocket with OAuth", without providing some kind of hard-coded, static or otherwise persistent authentication credentials to the calling system in some form (either certificate based auth, OAuth credentials, etc.)? The problem with IoT and embedded secrets isn't really a solved problem, from what I can tell. I'm not sure that OAuth exactly solves the problem here. Thoug…
The manufacturer should at least supply certificates, and it could be up to you to ignore or use. It's not much but it's something.
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#147Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#148It's more like telnetd died rather than telnet died.
btw if you want a quick telnet client, and an old python happens to be installed, you can use `python -m telnetlib IP`
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#149Why are people still using telnet across the internet in this century? Was this _all_ attack traffic? (OK, I know one ancient talker that uses it - but on a very non-standard port so a port 23 block wouldn't be relevant)
I run a DikuMUD that users connect to using Telnet I really should update it to allow more secure options
> that users connect to using Telnet
Not anymore ;)
Seriously though: did you notice any spikes up or down?
If you'd run it on a non-standard port, anyone can still connect with netcat, socat, etc etc.
Re: The Day the Telnet Died
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's crazy. This is core business critical software but they just YOLO critical changes without any automated tests? this PR would be insta-rejected in the small SAAS shop I work at.
If you think you can do better you're welcome to do better. I say this without a hint of sarcasm. This is how open source works. It's a do–ocracy, not a democracy. Whoever makes a telnet server gets to decide how the telnet server works and how much testing it gets before release.
Maybe the lesson here is to stop letting the GNU folks do things, if this is what they do. This is only one example of craziness coming out of the GNU camp.