Death Inc

This is awesome...

http://www.winvistaclub.com/e14.html

There is star wars pre installed on all windows 7 machines...

uh... no... you are telnetting to a server that is running a script to display ASCII star wars. Windows has nothing to do with it, you can do it on practically any machine that can connect to a network since telnet is one of the oldest protocols around...

and blinkenlights.nl has been around for years, I remember watching this on a Cisco Catalyst 2800 switch back in 2004 or so


It is, however, extremely cool, so anyone who hasn't seen this before stop wasting time and go watch it

my bad... :P

*dumps armful of heavy books marked 'Internet history' on dex's desk...*


Read them. Nobody wants this to fucking happen again

good its nothing important otherwise using telnet is the worst possible choice of protocol at least nowadays anyway

thanks DK, will get reading :)

good point.. i am ashamed of dex at the moment....more so than usual

Dear God.  The internet is so much more full of win now.

Nothing wrong with telnet.
Very versatile protocol.

try this:
run telnet.exe

Type:
open www.deathinc.com.au 80 <enter>
You probably won't be able to see the next two lines:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1 <enter>
host: www.deathinc.com.au <enter twice>

You should now see the index page markup come through the telnet window. If you scroll up you can read the text on the page.

This is basically all a web browser does to fetch a page, before parsing the output and generating a viewable webpage.


You can send email using telnet too... telnet to a mail server on port 25, use these commands
HELO <valid hostname>
MAIL FROM: <your email address>
RCPT TO: <recipient address>
DATA <enter>
type some crap<enter>
.<enter>

If you used valid hostnames and addresses and you had relay access to the server then your message should be sent.

90% of the internet's web and email traffic is done like the above, over an unencrypted connection, although its all done automatically by software so you don't have to type the protocol commands every time...
Many of the other protocols in use on the internet today are in fact plain text protocols and you can use them 'by hand' over a telnet connection to the correct port. Obviously its useless for any sort of real work but its great for testing and troubleshooting, but it just goes to show you just how simple the underlying technology of the internet is at its core. I have to perform both of the above on a daily basis as part of my job.

But even if you use SSL encryption, once you've set up the tunnel, the protocols behave the same way, and in fact if you set up the tunnel manually using openssl or similar you can telnet right through it and do exactly what I described above, with the added benefit of encryption.

Of course if you used telnet and transmitted sensitive data like passwords over it... that's bad because anybody might be listening. You should use SSH for that since it encrypts traffic and also has much better authentication features (like client side certificates) and protection from spoofed hosts...
but if all you want is encryption you can achieve the same results as just tunneling Telnet over an SSL tunnel.


welp that's my post thanks for reading