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A list of fun destinations for telnet

telnet.org

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Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#91
post #84
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. Are you being hyperbolic or do you seriously think the attack surface area of ANSI escape sequences is 'much more' than, say, Javascrpt?

JavaScript has to escape the browser sandbox, does telnet have a similar sandbox? Or can it access the system directly? I don't know the answer but if telnet can directly access the system that seems more dangerous irrespective of the attack surface.

Telnet is "sandboxed" in that it can only output characters to your tty, however that in itself is quite a powerful primitive.

The ANSI control characters wield power of a huge stack of not very robust code

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-56803

Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#93

My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise... People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever

How was a noise other than ASCII BEL sent over telnet?

Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sending email over telnet was part of my training as tech support for a dial-up ISP.

Back in 1991 the older students showed me how to telnet to port 25 and make my "From:" email address be anything. It was funny when the person sitting next to me received an email from satan@hell.gov

My very political grandpa definitely received a few emails from the "president", along with a few email from a "government agency" following up on the emails.

Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#98
post #4

The Star Wars ASCII animation was how I learned telnet existed. Felt like discovering a secret passage in the internet. There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.

I hate this server. Every single time someone talks about Telnet mentions this site for past FIFTEEN or TWENTY YEARS as something novel.

ITs not obscure, not unknown or special - it's the most known talent site on earth.

It was made AFIR to show capabilities of ffmpg ASCII/ANSI renderer.

Real gems are SDF.ORG, TWENEX.ORG, or Cray 1 supercomputer Access, bbses and backdoors.

Ps. Telnet can be run and it is DAILY inside of the telecoms and one of few ways to speak with BSC, RNC, RRUS and individual basebands(even ultra fresh with 5G). All over IP/SEC and isolated networks. You MUST know if you are serious about computer business hehe

AUDIT people also loves it - you can record entire session of Chinese or Swedish engineer doing some new shit to basebands. This or logging entire screen

Don't think it's dead.

Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#99
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have checked right now that Multi-User Dungeons we played in the 90s, still exist and are played. 35 years later! Telnet or Mudnet client needed :) I’ve just poked my schoolmate - he almost didn’t graduate because of MUD.

MUDding both taught me programming and pretty well wrecked my schooling, although in fairness, I didn't take college very seriously. Never finished my degree, which I now regret.

But you know TCL :)

Why do you regret it? People 40+ and juniors can't get jobs now anyways. Even with proper degrees.

Re: A list of fun destinations for telnet

#100
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO! I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!

sending email over telnet was part of my training as tech support for a dial-up ISP.

Hey. That was a gateway drug for teenage 'hackers' hehe

I remember grex.org and arbornet.org . My first free Unix shel acccounts hehe. Made friends worldwide.

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