Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last century I would read and send personal email from work using telnet to pop3 and smtp respectively.
perhaps you meant "in previous millennium" ?
perhaps you meant "in the Holocene"?
TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
241–250 of 255 posts
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#242Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#243Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep :) I just find example.com easier to remember and quicker to type than any of the OS or browser makers own URLs like - http://captive.apple.com/ - http://connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/generate_204 - http://detectportal.brave-http-only.com/ Plus, it feels nice to depend on the reserved domain name example.com instead of relying on a domain that any one specific corporation has to maintain :D
What gives you confidence example.com won't start serving the HTTPS redirect though? There isn't any reason they wouldn't, and given that browsers are clearly tending towards showing big scary warnings to even accessing something over cleartext, I wouldn't be surprised if they flipped that switch just to avoid confusing noobs.
True, that could happen. If it does do that then I will have to switch over to remembering a different URL instead. But as long as it hasn’t I will keep using http://example.com :)
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#245Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#246As a kid in the late 90s my mind was blown when I realized I could telnet to port 80, 25, or 110 and interact with the servers manually. Simple get: GET / HTTP/1.1 Content-Type: text/html User-Agent: l33t hax0rs lol X-Funny-Monkey: farts For sending a mail message on port 25: HELO mail-from: whoever@whatever.com mail-to: sysadmin@yaya.com Body of the message yay. POP3 was so long ago I forgot but you could list the m…
Also memories of making printing work on Linux in the late 90s to some old beast of an HP Laserjet. CUPS exited but was a pain to configure, so I’d just convert whatever I wanted to print to postscript, then Cat homework.ps > /dev/lp0
Ah this one was so long ago I forgot about it.
The realization that (on DOS) "copy con file.txt" as the world's worst text editor or "copy file lpt1:" was treating physical devices as files. Everything on the computer was arbitrary so you could make anything behave like anything else (for some definition of behave like)!
Not a great insight I'll grant but a key one that everyone has to go through to be any good.
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in those days not only was there was no DKIM or SPF, most SMTP servers would accept email from anyone anywhere to anyone anywhere (i.e. 'open relay').
[ Note: Anyone who has been a geek since the 90s, there's nothing you don't already know here ] > most SMTP servers would accept email from anyone anywhere to anyone anywhere (i.e. 'open relay'). to date that claim, I'd say that by the late 90s at least, true open relays ("from anyone to anyone") were still numerous but carried a huge assumption of being part of spam operations (willingly or through ineptitude), and…
> That said, (before things like SPF) it was easy enough to deliver email to anyone you wanted even if you didn't have your own real email account and SMTP server
Yup, this was also a fun exercise. Use nslookup, find the MX records, then telnet to them and deliver some mail destined for domains that email server handled. At that point you're just a slower version of a mail daemon.
In 2006 when FIOS first rolled out they assigned ARIN IP blocks to anyone who requested a static IP and I hosted my own webserver and email server on the web. So for a long time I had my own netblock and my email server had been around for so very long it was in everyone's legacy trusted list. Even gmail never bounced emails from me, despite not having SPF or DKIM and whatever else. Though I did eventually set those up. Only authed users could send email and that was a limited list so my netblock never actually delivered a spam message.
Funny enough I also setup default routing so all non-registered addresses went into a separate mailbox for me and I used the "companyname@mydomain.net" for everything. For many years I knew about every single data breech before anyone else. Often months or years ahead as spam would arrive out of nowhere to that address.
When I finally moved to the bay area to work in tech for real the entire world had changed. You couldn't just get a netblock assignment anymore. And lord knows even if your ISP wasn't deliberately sabotaging your ability to run a server every other system on the internet would assume you're a scamming spammer. I had to give up self-hosting on-prem.
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
The entirety of 1999 and 2000 was a nightmare. "No, buddy, we won't change millenium next january." "Nope. We are still in the 20th century." And so on... I think that's more or less when I lost faith in humanity.
But they were right and you were wrong. Your mistake is in thinking that years are cardinal numbers when they're actually ordinal. The current year counting was based on the same way years were counted in the past, so you had things like "the 10th year of Caesar's reign". So the year 1 A D. was the first year of Christ's reign. The year 2000 was the 2000th year of Christ's reign so that's what is celebrated. Alternat…
The first 10 years are 1 through 10. That is the first decade. Consequently, the next decade is years 11 through 20.
The first century is years 1 through 100. Therefore, the second century is years 201 through 300.
The first millenium is years 1 through 1000. Therefore, the second millenium is years 2001 through 3000.
There is no year zero.
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sent many an email from jacques.chirac@elysee.fr, the veneer of the terminal helping, my friends were quite impressed by how good a hacker I was. Good olde days when many DKIM/SPF weren't a thing yet and SMTP servers weren't even authenticated.
It was quite fun. But at my first work (begining of 2000s) there was one person that made a fun email, using From of head of company (or was it head of that particular division) to his coworker with congratulations for pay increase and promotion. It would be all great, but that coworker didn't catch the joke and replied to it (person in the From wasn't amused). Author of the joke was fired (which is not easy thing to…
Screwing with someones career isn't a joke. Shitcan-ee fully deserved it.
Re: TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
#250My favorite trick with this feature is pairing it a timeout
# Connection successful:
$ timeout 1 bash -c 'cat /dev/tcp/google.com/80'
$ echo $?
0