Comment by tokyobreakfast
13 days ago
An RCE in GNU's telnetd has no relationship to the sunsetting of telnet. Something could equally likely happen with SSH (but not really because the OpenBSD folks are paranoid by nature).
Apple removing the telnet client from OS X was a stupid move. How can you call yourself UNIX and not have a telnet client? It's like removing grep or ed.
There's no UNIX requirement for telnet.
Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Apple still includes uucp for some unknown reason.
The saving disk space argument makes no sense because telnet was one of the smaller binaries in /usr/bin.
Telnet continues to be widely used for select use cases and being told we're naughty by not including it feels punitive and just adds extra steps. What are you supposed to do, trash a $1m piece of industrial equipment because Apple wants to remind you Telnet is insecure?
New devices are still being released with Telnet where SSH is impractical or unnecessary.
There are many things I want to say in reply to this. So I’ll bullet point them:
* yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
* there are a million telnet clients out in the world. And ones far better than the default OS one. Apple not shipping one standard is not the end of the world or really anything more than a mild inconvenience for the small handful of people who need actual “Telnet” as opposed to Netcat or socat, both of which are far better than base Telnet.
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You can have it, it’s not on the base install.
99% of Mac users never use it, directly or indirectly. Asking that they have it anyway is a self centric view.
You can still have Telnet!!!
It just isn’t installed by default when 99% of users have no desire for it.
Ubuntu and derivates removing telnet from the default install, along with other basic tools like traceroute etc, was one of the driving factors toward me creating my own distro. I'm sick of basic stuff being omitted because somebody just decided it's not needed anymore.
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Netcat works as a telnet client. GAWK can do that too with a dumb loop. So can con(1) under 9front.
Using netcat results in showing Unicode replacement symbols, instead of answering to telnet options. I doubt it implements telnet at all, because this is just not its job.
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Thats what the mystery exceptions for the Open Group macOS UNIX certification was for!
telnet has never been in POSIX though.
It's a joke and a poke that macOS isn't certified UNIX as shipped.
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There's always nc hostname 23 unless you need authentication