A list of fun destinations for telnet

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!

I remember showing it to people on school computers circa....2008? Which was funny because nearly everything was blocked on these machines......but CMD and telnet worked fine lol. I remembered the URL by heart because of it :D

I discovered Telnet from some schlocky book [1] my parents had bought at Barnes and Noble about "Ethical Hacking" written by a guy who was later given a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20. I'd no idea it was a protocol - I thought it was just a program that let you talk directly to services like SMTP. I found netcat and friends later and thus never really got to use telnet for its intended purpose.

[1] https://archive.org/details/unofficialguidet0000fadi_r0y3/pa...

We run a copy using https://github.com/gabe565/ascii-movie, you can `nc starwars.s2.dev 23`

It's our favorite way of demoing s2.dev, https://x.com/jrdi/status/2014318511120670859

The tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com

Not many moving pictures either. It was like the literary age of the internet.

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.

For real! I just unlocked my memory of the Star Wars asciimation. Totally forgot it existed until now.

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

It still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it). It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)

Cool site! I especially like the list of RFCs.

Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)

try .com

Anyone knows what happened with it? Maybe the creator would like to pass the torch?

alternative: telehack.com

Wow, that scrolling banner...

It supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days.

That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.

And Slashem (his expanded sibling) and the server for Dungeon Crawl (for people which prefer action over exploration).

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?

Per this thread it may be IPv6 only now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775926

Tried:

- Venera

- Venera 7

- the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times.

- the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times

- the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet

- Rosetta

...

Okay found it: Venera Venera Venera

just type `starwars` from telehack

If you want a rabbit hole, this is the likely owner of both tel.net and sms.net = https://www.gbnet.net/

This makes me think of the historical hxxp://simtel.net/ domain (now web spam, whence the hxxp), see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.... The first time seeing it I was always thinking to something like "simulated telnet"...

Also teln.et (Ethiopia)

BatMUD is the one I played a long time ago, and has been around for 35 years now. I honestly don't know how active it is these days.

https://www.bat.org

I just checked and ancient.anguish.org is still online. Port 2222.

We'll all just be fingering each other.

That should be Gopher for websites but advertisers would find it should it become popular. Text chat via IRCD. Advertisers get banned on IRC.

Do you believe that it is impossible to advertise, spread fake news or propaganda via text?

Do you know what the letters in LLM mean?

ssh doesn't support virtual hosts, otherwise I'd try some other stuff. There's just something to be said for running on the default port.

Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.

haha, I was just going to say the same thing

i bet this is something an ai could help with. "write a simple telnet client in python. It only needs to connect to the host and display what the host sends. conform to any connection initialization requirements per rfc 854". That would probably get you close.

/edit front page of google did this and it worked for me. Need to do a pip install telnetlib3

  import telnetlib3
  import sys

  def simple_telnet_client(host, port=23):
    """
    Connects to a telnet server and prints incoming data.
    Compliant with RFC 854 (via telnetlib handling of NVTs).
    """
    try:
        # Initialize connection
        print(f"Connecting to {host}:{port}...")
        tn = telnetlib3.Telnet(host, port)

        # Read and display output indefinitely until connection closes
        while True:
            # read_eager() reads data already available without blocking
            data = tn.read_eager()
            if data:
                sys.stdout.write(data.decode('ascii', errors='ignore'))
                sys.stdout.flush()

            # Check if socket is closed
            if tn.get_socket() is None:
                break

    except ConnectionRefusedError:
        print("Connection refused.")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
    finally:
        if 'tn' in locals():
            tn.close()
            print("\nConnection closed.")

  if __name__ == "__main__":
    # Example usage:
    # simple_telnet_client("telehack.com", 23)

    # Replace with desired host
    host = input("Enter host: ")
    simple_telnet_client(host)

Search your OS repositories for something like inetutils-telnet.

May be a case of PEBKAC.