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The Day the Telnet Died

labs.greynoise.io

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Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#321

Post by Suzuran »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #216
virgulino wrote: post #169

Never mind telnetd. Tier 1 transit providers doing port filtering is EXTREMELY alarming. They have partitioned the Internet, and in a way that automatic routing (BGP) can't get around.

> 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…

I run a PDP-10 during the colder parts of the year. It's for historical preservation reasons. There are others doing the same thing. We still offer telnet access because that's how it worked back then. I guess we aren't going to be doing that anymore.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#322

Post by iamnothere »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #160
iamnothere wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL that IPsec can be used without encryption. That should work pretty well. Telnet is mostly used for auth and straightforward terminal/BBS access in my experience. There are some other alternatives like HamSSH but I don’t think it’s that common.

What I meant in my remark about Telnet is that, if you just want is a bidirectional byte pipe to e.g. run a terminal over, then you just need TCP or anything else providing the same abstraction, like TLS-over-TCP or TCP-over-IPsec; whether you then choose to run a getty on that terminal is not for the network to care. (I don’t believe you can get netcat to drive a PTY, so you’ll need e.g. socat. And of course if you…

It’s not so much what I need as what is in common use. Many BBS/terminal stacks for hams haven’t been updated in what seems like decades, except for security updates. It’s tough to get the old guard interested in changing, so they continue to offer their services via Telnet. I’m not sure if what they provide uses any advanced features or not.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#323

Post by Suzuran »

trebligdivad wrote: post #24

Why 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)

Some of us still run historical systems for preservation's sake.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#324

Post by zenethian »

RupertSalt wrote: post #312
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean something like this? mudplayer:x:1001:1001:MUD Player:/home/mudplayer:/usr/games/adventure

[flagged]

Their replies are only obtuse because you fail to see that you’re being made fun of for having such a ridiculous pedantic position about this. “Terminal” does not mean shell when you read the Telnet RFC. It means TTY. A human to machine interface. MUDs implement the Telnet protocol and provide a remote TTY. What’s running on the terminal is absolutely irrelevant.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#325

Post by Kim_Bruning »

RupertSalt wrote: post #312
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean something like this? mudplayer:x:1001:1001:MUD Player:/home/mudplayer:/usr/games/adventure

[flagged]

> Your MUD wizards made a bad, bad choice long ago when they picked port 23.

I'm confused. I refer you to my previous answer. Which does not specify a port, nor does it need to.

:x: can be a PAM database?

It's ... how I'd do it. You get a lot for free.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#326

Post by RupertSalt »

zenethian wrote: post #324
RupertSalt wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Their replies are only obtuse because you fail to see that you’re being made fun of for having such a ridiculous pedantic position about this. “Terminal” does not mean shell when you read the Telnet RFC. It means TTY. A human to machine interface. MUDs implement the Telnet protocol and provide a remote TTY. What’s running on the terminal is absolutely irrelevant.

[flagged]

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#327

Post by zenethian »

RupertSalt wrote: post #326
zenethian wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their replies are only obtuse because you fail to see that you’re being made fun of for having such a ridiculous pedantic position about this. “Terminal” does not mean shell when you read the Telnet RFC. It means TTY. A human to machine interface. MUDs implement the Telnet protocol and provide a remote TTY. What’s running on the terminal is absolutely irrelevant.

[flagged]

Can you show the exact line in the RFC or IANA port reservations that says it has to implement a shell login interface with the Telnet protocol if it’s on port 23? Because I can’t find it. Nothing says that anywhere.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#328

Post by RupertSalt »

ordu wrote: post #319
RupertSalt wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If MUDs and other games were indeed using port 23/tcp for player access, they were not only incorrect but rather dangerous. Since 23/tcp is a well-known IANA-registered port for the Telnet service, it is an RFC violation to use it for a service that is not telnetd/remote logins via TELNET protocol. Any port below 1024 signifies that it is a "privileged port". This is an archaic distinction that developed in high-trus…

> Any port below 1024 signifies that it is a "privileged port". This is an archaic distinction that developed in high-trust R&E networks, but it did signify that the listener on the port had administrative/root access to spawn a service there, so it was kind of a signal that you could "trust" the remote server with your login credentials. If something is running on a privileged port is not enough to trust it. Firstly…

[flagged]

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#329

Post by roywiggins »

taftster wrote: post #124
roywiggins wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of it seems to be substantially edited by an LLM too, or at least it's composed much like LLM outputs often are these days: “not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function.” "Not X, not Y, not Z" is a common LLM tic, and there's a few more like it in there.

I mean, that's fair. I guess I just wanted to put my old man hat on. The song is a tribute to an era of lost innocence. Which I think is quite apropos to the current situation surrounding telnet. Vestiges of the days of the early internet continue to disappear, almost like an endangered species. Old/obsolete protocols, like telnet, are pined for by old guys like me.

Oh, I have fond memories, I learned to touch-type playing MUDs.

Re: The Day the Telnet Died

#330

Post by unethical_ban »

RupertSalt wrote: post #275
VadimPR wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of text games - MUDs - still play over telnet using dedicated MUD clients that implement their own telnet stack. Outright blocking the port has an outsized side efffe on them, this is simply not right.

If MUDs and other games were indeed using port 23/tcp for player access, they were not only incorrect but rather dangerous. Since 23/tcp is a well-known IANA-registered port for the Telnet service, it is an RFC violation to use it for a service that is not telnetd/remote logins via TELNET protocol. Any port below 1024 signifies that it is a "privileged port". This is an archaic distinction that developed in high-trus…

Yes, and sftp and scp should not operate on port 22 because that isn't proper, interactive SSH!
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