Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Day the Telnet Died

labs.greynoise.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 414 posts

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#261

Post by ErroneousBosh »

dekhn wrote: post #202
breve wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

telnet lambda.moo.mud.org 8888

MUDs were my introduction to telnet- I grew up a university kid and had access to Wesleyan's minicomputer EAGLE.WESLEYAN.EDU running OpenVMS. I used it to telnet to CMU's TinyMUD and later other TinyMUDs around the country. I recall OpenVMS's telnet had a problem with newlines/carriage returns so all the text was staircased, so I ended up learning C and writing a MUD client. I still habitually use telnet today even i…

For a few weeks I ran a MUD over AX.25 for a couple of my friends.

Because on their own, MUDs aren't nerdy enough, amateur radio isn't nerdy enough, and indeed packet radio isn't nerdy enough.

Eventually we decided we'd had our fun and now I needed to the TNC for something else.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#262

Post by qingcharles »

Quarrel wrote: post #107

What an amazing bug. I probably spent my first 10 years on the internet just using telnet. They were wild times. You could log ethernet traffic and see passwords. Towards the end of those we started to have a few more single-user machines, but the vast majority were old school many many user machines, where "root" was thought to be tightly restricted (of course, even then, in practice it wasn't if you were in the kno…

When did we all stop using telnet? I can't even remember. Most of my first 10-15 years was using telnet. One day I used telnet to connect to a shell for the last time and didn't know it. I had a ton of servers all with root telnet access Internet facing. Never hacked once, somehow. Those were the days.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#263

Post by linuxftw »

EE84M3i wrote: post #171
mmh0000 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

netcat, socat and openssl s_client are all available for general manual connection testing. As are many other tools. But the ones above are basically far better direct telnet alternatives.

I've never really understood why it's a thing to use a telnet client for transmitting text on a socket for purposes other than telnet. My understanding is that telnet is a proper protocol with escape sequences/etc, and even that HTTP/SMTP/etc require things like \r\n for line breaks. Are these protocols just... close enough that it's not a problem in practice for text data?

In the days of yore, Windows had telnet installed. Most hackers used telnet in the 90's and early 2000's.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#264

Post by tosti »

ncruces wrote: post #254
tosti wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a net-neutrality issue because they're not banking on any alternative. Net-neutrality law doesn't work like that. Service providers still get to filter stuff. What's illegal for an ISP is e.g. to give VoIP services other than their own a lower priority. That would tie in customers to use their own service and they could even charge more for it. Net neutrality means a level playing field for services on the I…

This is not an ISP. It's a Tier 1 transit provider.

The more unlikely they would violate net neutrality unless they would be tied in to CDNs and accept a bribe to favour one service over another.

Possible but unlikely.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#265

Post by tosti »

miki123211 wrote: post #252
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tier 1 transit providers doing port filtering is EXTREMELY alarming. I was admining a small ISP when blaster and its variants hit. Port filtering 139 and the rest was the easiest way to deal with it, and almost over night most of the ISPs blocked it, and we were better for it. There was a time when if you'd put a fresh XP install on the Internet you'd get 5-10 minutes until it would get restarted. I guess if you're…

Changes like these lend even more credibility to the approach of putting everything on port 443 over TLS, and distinguishing protocols based on hostname / HTTP path.

Wireguard over 443/udp is also a neat trick. No need to make it look like quic although I wouldn't be surprised if someone takes the effort to make it that stealthy.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#266

Post by zh3 »

gspr wrote: post #217
oaiey wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know what is more critical: the risk of censorship or stand by while hospitals, banking, nuclear power plants and other systems become compromised and go down with people dying because of it. These decision makers not only have powers but also have a responsibility

This feels more akin to discovering an alarming weakness in the concrete used to build those hospitals, banks and nuclear power plants – and society responding by grounding all flights to make sure people can't get to, and thus overstress, the floors of those hospitals, banks and nuclear power plants.

In the UK we have in fact discovered an alarming weakness in the concrete used to build schools, hospitals and other public building (in one case, the roof of a primary school collapsed without warning). The response was basically "Everybody out now".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Kingdom_reinforced...

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/raac-crisis...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/31/what-is-ra...

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#267

Post by myko »

conesus wrote: post #167
myko wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, not really. We are on a non-standard port (9000). I just meant some folks use the telnet client to connect, and we do negotiate some telnet options. I use tintin++ these days but I think most of our players are still using decades old zMUD versions to connect!

I always preferred gmud, but zmud has all the bells and whistles. All I needed was ANSI color, aliases, triggers, and command history. How can I get access?

ncmdu.net 9000 :)

Pretty slow these days, hack 'n slash style game

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#268

Post by lmm »

icedchai wrote: post #166
ieie3366 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

Most 90’s era software had zero tests. Nobody gave it a second thought.

Early '90s maybe. By the late '90s people knew tests were a good idea, and many even applied that in practice.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#269

Post by dudefeliciano »

AnonHP wrote: post #128

So 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…

I don’t remember how I did it but when I was about 12 years old I somehow managed to send SMS from Telnet to cell phones, and to the receiver they appeared to be sent by an official Telecom account - good that I was still an innocent child, had I discovered this a few years later I may have tried doing something nefarious with it.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#270

Post by dizhn »

forty wrote: post #238
gspr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I'm saying is that the only right place to fix this is at the hospital. Not at the roads leading to it.

There again, I think the comparison fails. Fixing the hospital: single place to work on, easier Blocking all the roads/flights: everywhere, harder Vs Fixing all the telnet: everywhere, harder/impossible Blocking port 23 on an infra provider: single place, easier It makes sense to me to favor the realistic solution that actually works vs the unrealistic one which is guaranteed not fix the issue, especially when it's m…

I run telnetd on 2323 because I don't want hackers to find it.
Post reply on HN