7 ms·
As a kid in the late 90s my mind was blown when I realized I could telnet to port 80, 25, or 110 and interact with the servers manually. Simple get: GET / HTTP
by xenadu02 3mo ago
As a kid in the late 90s my mind was blown when I realized I could telnet to port 80, 25, or 110 and interact with the servers manually.
Simple get:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/html
User-Agent: l33t hax0rs lol
X-Funny-Monkey: farts
For sending a mail message on port 25:
HELO
mail-from: whoever@whatever.com
mail-to: sysadmin@yaya.com
<other headers>
<blank line>
Body of the message yay.
<two blank lines to end>
POP3 was so long ago I forgot but you could list the mailboxes then get individual messages and so on.
This revelation was the beginning of "there is no magic" for me. The realization that every part of the computer was built by human beings and was at some level understandable if one undertook the effort.
Perhaps most people in the future won't bother. They'll just let agents do it all. I'm sure that will leave some interesting holes in various systems for people willing to actually learn how they work without the filter of a model (or its safety rails).
- kps 3mo agoLast century I would read and send personal email from work using telnet to pop3 and smtp respectively.
- bijowo1676 3mo agoperhaps you meant "in previous millennium" ?
- chrisbrandow 3mo agoPresumably the years including 1999 and earlier
- __float 3mo agoIf someone referred to the "previous decade" in 2004, would you have said the same thing? As the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000, we entered a new millennium, century, decade, year, day, ...
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3mo agoYes, absolutely. I use the largest interval any time I can get away with it! Every Jan 2 I start saying "last year" and every Dec I say "see you next year"
- xeonmc 3mo agoJust following alignment rules right?
- bijowo1676 3mo agowhen you compare tech from 1999 and today, it does feel like new millennium tbh
- fsckboy 3mo ago>As the calendar rolled from 1999 to 2000, we entered a new millennium, century, decade, year, day, ... no, that all happened when we rolled from 2000 to 2001. smh, even paedants today aren't what they used to be.
- johncoltrane 3mo agoThe entirety of 1999 and 2000 was a nightmare. "No, buddy, we won't change millenium next january." "Nope. We are still in the 20th century." And so on... I think that's more or less when I lost faith in humanity.
- account42 3mo agoYou lost faith in humanity because people disagree about an arbitrary zero offset?
- onraglanroad 3mo agoBut they were right and you were wrong. Your mistake is in thinking that years are cardinal numbers when they're actually ordinal. The current year counting was based on the same way years were counted in the past, so you had things like "the 10th year of Caesar's reign". So the year 1 A D. was the first year of Christ's reign. The year 2000 was the 2000th year of Christ's reign so that's what is celebrated. Alternatively, you don't really care about that and it's called Common Era now anyway, but in that case it's entirely arbitrary. So either way, calling 2001 the New Millennium is wrong!
- wing-_-nuts 3mo agoExcuse me while I crumble to dust...
- lavela 3mo agoperhaps you meant "in the Holocene"?
- bijowo1676 3mo agothe Holocene is over, we are in the Anthropocene era
- lavela 3mo agoI know, that's why it'd be an alternative to "in the last millenium" if they try to use the largest time frame that just ended.
- vbezhenar 3mo agoYou can actually do that today. In fact I did that for some time, because I didn't want to configure e-mail client. The only hard thing is HTML. Average HTML e-mail is almost impossible to read and friction to extract it to a file to open in a browser is too much.
- Joeboy 3mo agoI also have a tendency to say "Last century", thinking it comedically suggests "a long time ago" without it actually being that long ago. But as time goes by it obviously becomes legitimately a long time ago, and I suspect young people wouldn't see the attempted irony at all.
- benj111 3mo ago'last century' 'turn of the century' etc just make me think the 1800s. So I just say last millennium. Probably get confusing again when people start referring to 'the 20s' not as the 1920s.
- jazz9k 3mo agoWhen I was 12, I learned about open SMTP relays and how to spoof email this way. I once spoofed an email between two rivals on a community I was a part of and started a flame war. Good times.
- sejje 3mo agoI once made an enemy on AOL and he was a spammer--he put my email in the from: field and I got a lot of hostile emails. But the joke's on him--it led directly to me meeting a lifelong friend & mentor.
- Denatonium 3mo agoWhen I was in high school in the mid 2010s, Verizon's email-to-SMS gateway didn't verify SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and I had a field day showing my classmates the Viagra ads that Hillary Clinton's "hacked" email server was sending me. In reality, it was an open relay, but Verizon didn't care; they always delivered it anyway.
- MuffinFlavored 3mo agoI must have tried to write the same "perfect" IRC client from scratch in C a dozen times growing up...
- lacunary 3mo agoany cool features you can share?
- razodactyl 3mo agoMe too! Writing Winsock and learning WinAPI on XP then Vista. It took me a while to realise Linux was better / OSX was my gateway drug haha
- eqmvii 3mo agoYep! It’s all just text files. Lots of acronyms in top of lots of ways to generate, send, and read structured text files. One day I realized even databases were just text files and I had to sit down.
- inigyou 3mo agoThere are also many binary files. Most databases are binary files which are wide trees of some kind (e.g. B-trees, B+trees)
- rahimnathwani 3mo agoBack in those days not only was there was no DKIM or SPF, most SMTP servers would accept email from anyone anywhere to anyone anywhere (i.e. 'open relay').
- xp84 3mo ago[ Note: Anyone who has been a geek since the 90s, there's nothing you don't already know here ] > most SMTP servers would accept email from anyone anywhere to anyone anywhere (i.e. 'open relay'). to date that claim, I'd say that by the late 90s at least, true open relays ("from anyone to anyone") were still numerous but carried a huge assumption of being part of spam operations (willingly or through ineptitude), and the most basic spam filtering would reject mail that came out of one. That said, (before things like SPF) it was easy enough to deliver email to anyone you wanted even if you didn't have your own real email account and SMTP server; you could just look up the destination's MX and connect to it with telnet like that. Since your own random IP probably wasn't blocklisted it would generally be accepted and delivered. Back then it was still basically considered bad form to reject email simply because the server didn't know where it was from... sadly, if we were still playing by those rules today, I can only imagine how useless email would be. Now it's definitely guilty-till-proven-innocent.
- awesome_dude 3mo agoThe magic for me, to this day in fact, is knowing that mail is essentially anyone on the internet being allowed to write to a mail servers disk. There are rules now, but the concept is still almost intact, random people writing to the servers disk - to be later read by someone
- soneil 3mo agoIt used to be even more literally so - network mail started off as using FTP to SNDMSG onto a remote system instead of your own. In RFC475, FTP has MAIL and MLFL (mailfile) commands to support this. I think it's neat that you can still find echoes of this. MAIL worked by just appending to MLFL, separating records with CRLF.CRLF - which is still how Data segments are terminated in SMTP.
- vbezhenar 3mo agoYou can't do that with HTTP/2 (but thankfully every server still talks HTTP/1). You also can't do that with TLS (and a lot of servers won't talk HTTP other than redirects). openssl s_client instead of telnet might allow you to tunnel text inside TLS, but that feels like a cheating. And many other modern protocols, sadly, prefer binary encoding, which makes it impossible to tinker with it on wire level, not without specialized tools anyway. I think people in the future will bother. I tried to make a fire with sticks once, I tried to burn a clay brick, these old things can be a lot of fun and sometimes of real use. If anything, AI actually makes tinkering a lot more easier. You don't need to dig into RFC to check your mail, you can just talk to LLM about it and it'll help you with most typical IMAP commands, for example.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoNothing to regret. Text Protocol is too inefficient.
- account42 3mo agoCompared to inefficiencies in the average payload? No, it doesn't really matter.
- inigyou 3mo agoopenssl s_client -host google.com -port 443 You're welcome. Works like netcat plus TLS. Kind of inconvenient though. Hey someone should write tlsnc.
- charles_f 3mo agoI sent many an email from jacques.chirac@elysee.fr, the veneer of the terminal helping, my friends were quite impressed by how good a hacker I was. Good olde days when many DKIM/SPF weren't a thing yet and SMTP servers weren't even authenticated.
- cferry 3mo ago"Cher compatriote, voici, rédigé avec mes clavier et mulot, mon programme de l'an 2000 que j'ai après la dissolution..."
- krzyk 3mo agoIt was quite fun. But at my first work (begining of 2000s) there was one person that made a fun email, using From of head of company (or was it head of that particular division) to his coworker with congratulations for pay increase and promotion. It would be all great, but that coworker didn't catch the joke and replied to it (person in the From wasn't amused). Author of the joke was fired (which is not easy thing to do in Europe), some people don't catch jokes.
- TylerE 3mo agoScrewing with someones career isn't a joke. Shitcan-ee fully deserved it.
- dhosek 3mo agoWhen I was working at the computing center at University of Illinois at Chicago in the 80s, we found a fairly simple route to spoofing emails from other users through batch jobs on the MVS side of our mainframe. It came crashing to a halt when someone sent a spoofed email from the director to one of the other employees saying that they were fired and to bring their keys to her office immediately. I think the person responsible nearly lost his job over that, but as I recall, the ability to do this was never closed.
- qingcharles 3mo agoI ran an EFnet server in the mid-90s and therefore could fake DNS entries for myself. I was often on IRC from "aliens.gov" which seemed funny at the time, but now that domain finally became an unfunny reality.
- CGamesPlay 3mo ago> Perhaps most people in the future won't bother. They'll just let agents do it all. But can you imagine the look on some young teen’s face when they train their own GPT on their local computer for the first time?
- nico 3mo agoIt was also cool discovering the ATA commands to drive the modem. You could “war-dial” numbers, or manually initiate Internet connection, or connecting to a bbs
- globular-toast 3mo agoI never figured out you could do it with HTTP, but for some reason I did for FTP and IRC. I don't know why I first tried using a telnet client but I couldn't believe it when the server responded to me!
- alex_smart 3mo agoIsn't that the whole point of TCP? Creating a pair of two streams you can read out of and write to out of less reliable network primitives? I am not sure why this is a revelation. Any college level networking course would cover this?!
- reaktivo 3mo ago> Any college level networking course would cover this?! As an actual kid it's easy for it to be a revelation, no? At least it was for me, with no college level networking course experience.
- alex_smart 3mo agoSorry my brain somehow missed the literal first three words of the oc.
- ExoticPearTree 3mo agoHELO is for SMTP, EHLO for ESMTP. You could access some “advanced” features of the server if you told it you speak ESMTP.
- TylerE 3mo agoAlso memories of making printing work on Linux in the late 90s to some old beast of an HP Laserjet. CUPS exited but was a pain to configure, so I’d just convert whatever I wanted to print to postscript, then Cat homework.ps > /dev/lp0
- xenadu02 3mo agoAh this one was so long ago I forgot about it. The realization that (on DOS) "copy con file.txt" as the world's worst text editor or "copy file lpt1:" was treating physical devices as files. Everything on the computer was arbitrary so you could make anything behave like anything else (for some definition of behave like)! Not a great insight I'll grant but a key one that everyone has to go through to be any good.
- wing-_-nuts 3mo agoI was in the hospital at 13, 7 hours from home, and lonely. They had a councilor there who took pity on me and agreed to let me use her computer to check my email. Only provision was that I couldn't install anything, and couldn't change any settings. She stood behind me and watched bemused as I fired up telnet, connected to my ISP's pop server and started reading emails from friends. I think I did manage to send some emails back via SMTP but I was not as good with that protocol. If you could bottle the creativity and enthusiasm of a bored teen, I'm pretty sure you could take over the world