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Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
- smalltorch 2mo agoI like it. Just one cell. Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.
- andros 2mo agothe bare minimum!
- ur-whale 2mo agofinger is the best-named utility of the Unix world.
- andros 2mo agoSecond place is Cat
- cb321 2mo agoDon't forget head, tail, mount, strip, touch, etc. My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).
- _flux 2mo agoI rather enjoy the derivative name tac as well, and I suppose you can count GNU tools to be in the Unix world.
- Multiplayer 2mo agoAhhhhh memories. As far as I remember this didn't really spread beyond the PC game developer world. Back in the day we built an automated finger puller (poller) to grab all the game developers .plans and post them on PlanetQuake, etc (depending on which game they were working on). At the time it was considered a core feature for hot game news! Certainly the twitter of its' time for direct from the horse's mouth news.
- andros 2mo agoFantastic! How lovely to read these stories. And what influences Id has had on Finger.
- arscan 2mo agoI was very into PC gaming during this era, and ran a decently sized gaming news website, and Carmacks use of .plan as a one-to-many microblog was really a decade or two ahead of what became mainstream twitter’s primary use case. None of the games I ‘covered’ had enough .plan activity by the developers to warrant an automated script, but I remember being really impressed by the sites that did it (usually id-centric ones like blues news or stomped I think?) Such good memories. I think my whole career has been built around chasing the feeling I had when making that gaming site.
- l72 1mo agoicculus [1] (who ported a bunch of games to linux), still uses finger [2] [1] https://icculus.org/~icculus/ [2] https://icculus.org/finger/icculus
- crmd 2mo agoFingering was huge at my university in the late 90s and seemed very focused on relationships. Passive aggressive and extremely emo .plans was very much a thing when some people’s feelings were hurt. If you were interested in someone you were definitely fingering them to see from where they were last logged in (we used to call this finger stalking). Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk. We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
- andros 2mo agoI'm dying! Using Telnet to flirt. The father of Tinder XD
- xprnio 2mo agoNo, that I think would be Match.com or something along those lines. This is like the grandfather or grand-grandfather of Tinder, but not even intentionally. What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
- inigyou 2mo agomatch.com is a company that literally owns Tinder and nearly every "dating site" btw (even the one you're thinking of, it doesn't matter, it owns all of them including the ones that used to pride themselves on not being owned by match.com).
- mwigdahl 2mo agoIn the late 80s, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend via email while they were both sitting in the same computer lab.
- mnw21cam 2mo agoThere was a fellow student at university who put the entire Hunting Of The Snark in their .plan file. It scrolled for a while.
- zaik 2mo ago> No encryption, no headers, no sessions. Pure simplicity. AI smell?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bargainbin 2mo agoThose commas do appear to be a load-bearing seam for the sentence — that’s not guaranteed proof, it’s just strong indication.
- computerfriend 2mo agoYou mean "smoking gun".
- quietsegfault 2mo agoThe honest read: it’s not just AI, it’s annoying!
- NoDodgeQuestion 2mo agodisclose: "AI is one more tool. I use it for mechanical tasks: polishing the wording, catching typos, suggesting synonyms, improving or adapting code blocks and translating the article between Spanish and English."
- layer8 2mo agoAI was definitely used in the writing; it’s a pity.
- maeln 2mo agoThis is also a very common way to write (hence why LLM tend to regurgitate it so much).
- bshimmin 2mo agoIt always reminds me of how how Apple write the copy for their landing pages. (A couple of examples from the current MacBook Neo page include "Silver, Blush, Citrus, and Indigo. Four stunning colors. One durable design" and "macOS. Easy to use. Runs all your go-to apps. Puts the fun in functional".) It's quite similar to a rhetorical device called the ascending tricolon, and it's definitely not normally how people speak or write unless they're making a deliberate effort to achieve this effect.
- lode 2mo agoRelated fun site: plan.cat (discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29248368 )
- jonathandeamer 2mo agoNice to see this here today. A number of hosts the article mentions are on the startpage of lookit, a finger client I've been building: happynetbox, plan.cat, thebackupbox's finger webring, etc. The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time. I just released a v0.2 beta, feedback welcome: https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0-beta.2 https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0...
- andros 2mo agoGreat work! Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that. I'd also like to mention that if you have Emacs, I also have my own client: https://git.andros.dev/andros/efinger.el https://git.andros.dev/andros/efinger.el
- jonathandeamer 2mo ago"The Charted Public Fingerverse" does a pretty good job at this! https://640kb.neocities.org/fingerverse/ https://640kb.neocities.org/fingerverse/ Was definitely an inspiration for lookit. And yes, a search engine would be cool!
- andros 2mo agoWow! Thank you!
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- elric 2mo agoA discussion about Finger without a mention of WebFinger[1]? Similar in spirit, but HTTP based. [1] https://webfinger.net https://webfinger.net
- OhMeadhbh 2mo agoTHX! I was trying to remember this reference.
- quuxplusone 2mo agoTFA includes a link to an archive of John Carmack's .plan updates, 1996–2010: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/master/by_year https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast... (1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?
- RenThraysk 2mo agoBluesNews has archives of some more people in gaming from back then. https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/summary.pl https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/summary.pl
- mister_mort 2mo agoI imagine Carmack's plan files were monitored because people were starving for as much id Software news as they could get, and going straight to the source rather than waiting on gaming news sites for digests would be the smart thing to do.
- OhMeadhbh 2mo agoI used to work at Convex w/ Jay Finger, whose username was "finger". I thought it was funny I could `finger finger` and it would actually do something. This was back when we had multiple users per machine and in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`. Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.
- selcuka 2mo ago> in the old days if you didn't provide a domain name, the finger command would default to hitting `localhost`. It still does (at least on my MacBook): $ finger myusername Login: myusername ... ... No Mail. No Plan.
- newsomix9xl 2mo agoMaybe, an ssh version?
- OhMeadhbh 2mo agoAlso... When we moved from having multiple users per machine to multiple machines per user, services like finger on a specific machine didn't make much sense. It seems you should have one well-advertised machine that maps `foo@example.com` to a `plan.html` file somewhere. (If a user has multiple machines, which one do you query to get their daily .plan?) Maybe the answer is to define a plan base URL as a DNS TXT resource on a particular DNS domain. For instance, I added the string `< plan https://bi6.us/PL/ https://bi6.us/PL/ >` as a TXT resource at _plan.hamrick.rocks. It should now be a trivial task to write a program called `finger-ng` that when I type `finger-ng meadhbh@hamrick.rocks`, it queries the TXT record at `_plan.hamrick.rocks`, extracts the plan base URL and then retrieves and displays a text document found at `https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks`. I guess you could serve up a text/plain, text/html or even image/avif if you wanted to. This, of course, assumes `bi6.us` is set up to allow me to update that file, but this is also straight-forward. Anyway, check back in a couple days and I'll have some code and I'll write the RFC/ID next week. EDIT: I wrestled with apache and got it to understand files under www.bi6.us/PL/ should be served as text/dsd+plain, so you can hit `HTTPS://BI6.US/PL/MEADHBH%40HAMRICK.ROCKS` and get something that looks legit. And sure enough, HTTPS://BI6.US/PL/MEADHBH%40HAMRICK.ROCKS encodes to a smaller QR code than https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks. (Though it looks like the HN text beautifier doesn't automagically produce links for URLs beginning with upper-case HTTPS.) EDIT EDIT: Hmm... still doesn't say anything about privacy. What if you wanted to have a different _plan file for friends, a _plan file for family and a _plan file for co-workers? Clearly deep thoughts must be thunk.
- righthand 2mo agoAll of this is addressed in the article. The protocol doesn’t address this stuff because it’s meaningless in the context of the protocol. If you want the extra features then there are other protocols and social networks. Also if you wanted a .plan for different people you would code your own server as in the article and tie it to a different “user”. The original server ties .plan files to username home dirs but there’s nothing stopping you from changing how that effectively works on your own server.
- seoulbigchris 2mo agoIn the mid-90s I taught a night class on Unix, and was experimenting with shell scripts from The Unix Programming Environment. There was an example using a loop and the who command to alert you when someone logged onto your local system. My cousin was a professor at a university several states away, and we had already figured out the talk command. So I decided to expand the examples in the book to use finger. By parsing the reply, somehow I could tell if my cousin was logged on, and I would send myself a notice. There was an ISP in the same building, and one day the ISP engineer came to visit me with a stern look. He asked, "By any chance are you sending a finger command every two minutes to this university's mainframe?" I proudly answered, "As a matter of fact, yes, I am!". I eagerly got out my Unix book to show him what I was doing. He just said, "Stop doing that. They have a system console logging program that has churned out dozens of pages of paper printouts because of you". I sheepishly acknowledged my mistake and quit running the script.
- ButlerianJihad 2mo agoSpeaking of finger, console logging, and the 90s: when I was a freshman in college I took a Pascal programming course. We were assigned accounts on a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. The students only had access to a terminal lab; the servers were upstairs, out of our reach. There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system. As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!" Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator. I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.
- steve_taylor 2mo agoFinger was only part of the social network. The multi-user aspect of Unix itself combined with standard tools such as who, finger, write, mesg, talk, mail, biff, etc. combined to form a fairly complete text-based social network.
- hamza_ali_shah 2mo agowoah, never knew.. so cool.
- billfor 2mo agoDon't forget Zephyr as well - the original AIM....
- bketelsen 2mo agoWhen GitHub released their status update feature I re-imagined finger for the modern world: https://github.com/bketelsen/finger https://github.com/bketelsen/finger I didn't advertise it, nobody cared. But it was fun.
- runnr_az 2mo agoHaha... looks like I gotta get finger.farm up and running again... :) Thx for the mention blogger! https://github.com/jonroig/finger.farm https://github.com/jonroig/finger.farm
- mdwelsh 2mo agoMan! I’m disappointed this article didn’t mention the coolest .plan hack of all time: you could link your .plan file to a named socket so whenever someone fingered you, an arbitrary program would run that spat out whatever output it wanted back to the client. Made for some very fun hacks, like randomly generated text every time you were fingered, or showing things like the current load on the server, etc…
- ChaseRensberger 2mo agoI started working on a "modern finger alternative" called winger: https://github.com/ChaseRensberger/winger https://github.com/ChaseRensberger/winger, and was planning to write an article just like this! Glad to see other people interested in this stuff.
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoProtocol named Finger
- evilbob93 2mo agoFunny thing: today at work, I was curious. Windows utility? try a few of the handles in the article. Couple hours later, i get pinged in Teams by someone in the security group who, who was flagged for my activity. No harm, but he said that they watched it because it had been used for malware. Said I shouldn't use it unless i had some business need, would need to do a request apparently.
- nutts 2mo agoI set fingerd up on my OpenBSD host: finger nutts@nutts.org Also worth checking: finger ring@thebackupbox.net
- kstrauser 2mo agoAnd those both work over IPv6, which I thought was a delightful mix of the old and new. Nice!
- egorfine 2mo agoImpossible to run practically if your site is on CDN. Finger connects to the A record IP directly. Unfortunately.
- dramm 2mo agoI occasionally find myself longing for talk(1) to actually work on Macs.
- geokon 2mo agoNAT makes this kind of stuff impractical now a days b/c you can't really host anything from your own machine (well you can set up port forwarding if you can access the router...) The easiest modern solution would probably be git pulling from an Onion address (running git daemon so it's read only). Then, when your machine is on, people that want updates would just git pull git://abcdef1234567890.onion/fingerfood.git Though tbh.. the single-file setup of finger is cuter than a whole repo directory
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- qarl2 2mo agoIn 1989 I wrote a little hack to turn my .plan into a named pipe. That way - anytime someone fingered me - I could do a netstat to detect where they were coming from. My friend heard about this and fingered me 10,000 times in 5 minutes, and the computer science department's file server went down and I almost got fired.
- mlmonkey 2mo agoThe best part was you could `finger @machine` and it would list all the users currently logged on, their idle times, etc. Then you could follow that with `talk user@machine` and start chatting with them.
- icedchai 2mo ago"Finger" is how my teenage self got into hacking. I'd dial into local universities, which all had open terminal servers. No authentication needed for the terminal servers. That didn't give me host access though, but I could run "status" or "who" or something and see who was connected and where they were connecting to (CS dept Sun server, etc.) I'd then connect to port 79 (finger) of the host, which let me see the logins and names of who was connected. Because these were college students, they often used their first or last name as a password. I'm sure you can figure it out from there.
- est 2mo agoI like the old MSN/GTalk "presence" idea Type your current status in a bar. And the thing that aggregates them? Twitter. People like to peek into what others are doing.
- mark_something 2mo agoThere are people advocating for a new social network that is distributed and not owned by a single company. Turns out it already existed before the modern social networks!
- SoftTalker 1mo agoNever died? Nobody runs fingerd anymore. Yes the code still exists, and it still works if you run it, but that's true of almost any old software.
- snohobro 1mo agoTrue, but I do find it fascinating that it still comes as a standard on my OS. Plus the fact that if I do run it, it just works. No annoying tinkering and adjustments or reconfigs. I can’t say the same for a lot of iOS applications developed in 2011. Just because it’s not widely used doesn’t mean it’s dead.
- alexellisuk 1mo agoI also very fond memories of the finger command - though mainly used on MUDs and the odd Linux host: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-90s-unix-command-fell-out-of-favour/ https://blog.alexellis.io/the-90s-unix-command-fell-out-of-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943313
- clear0250 1mo ago"When someone fingers you..."
- teddyh 1mo agoI remember xhtalk; a little program you would configure with a list of hosts and user names, and it would show a small window (which you would place in a convenient corner of your screen) where each user name was highlighted when they logged on anywhere (the program would periodically finger each machine and search for your configured user names). If you clicked on a user name, it would start a new terminal with a talk session to that user to the machine where they were logged on. Basically an instant messenger before any others.
- Bender 1mo agoOne could further keep finger alive so to speak using DNS [1] and without exposing any ports. In 2026 there are probably more people with domains or developer sub-domains than people exposing port 79 to the internet. Not just for individuals, companies could add the record as an Easter egg. [1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260527-DNS-A-Replacement-For-Finger/ https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260527-DNS-A-Replacemen...
- andros 1mo agoI'm doing it myself, it's a stream of my .plan: https://andros.dev/now/ https://andros.dev/now/
- nickdothutton 1mo agoI've begun and abandoned a "modern take on finger" a couple of times. Sits in the pile (folder) of unfinished projects and at the back of my mind cluttering up the synapses. The reason I began thinking about this... my dissatisfaction/annoyance with all the dark patterns, mode of participation, and ensh*ttification in social networks. I began using UNIX in the early 90s when finger was still quite useful, and yes we did connect it to a named pipe for all sorts of fun (like a finger to SMS gateway).
- pfdietz 1mo agoLes Earnest died in 2024 at the age of 93.
- andros 1mo agoI added his name to the article and dedicated it to him. Thank you for the suggestion.
- ddasdasdsa 1mo ago[flagged]
- cykros 1mo agoUser enumeration seems to be the biggest hazard of running a server. I'd be curious to see a fingerd that lets you set a different name than your actual username, to avoid just spitting out names that an attacker can then set to work on cracking passwords for with an ssh daemon. Though I'm sure people will tell me that ssh keys sort this issue well enough -- and given that nobody self hosts email the spam issue isn't really there either. Still, something like a masked identd used for masking system usernames for irc would go a long way to break the link between actual user accounts and display names for finger.