Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Technology report

Technology report

Browse Wikipedia in safety? Use Telnet!

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Hmm I feel some of the hardware hasn't been properly battle tested yet. Something a bit more old school might be a better choice:

This may have comic aspects, but it is well informed and insightful. And it is true that TELNET had one clear advantage - it dates back to a time when program was program and data was data. There probably really isn't a special character sequence that indicates the following output should actually be saved and executed to take over your computer. I miss that kind of program that you could look and see you genuinely can't hack me with it, versus these things that have a new critical vulnerability whenever the old one expires. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if even the TELNET approach doesn't work against that Tor exploit, because (even if Snowden has never said a peep about it) I am suspicious that your saved uuencoded kiddie porn would be recognized by your friendly local antivirus program as a "threat", duly reported to their site, and it would upload a "patch" to you to help fix the virus, with predictable results. But I've never heard such a thing in the news ... and doubt I will this time either. Wnt (talk) 14:38, 2 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- @Wnt: [1] [2]. Bawolff (talk) 22:38, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  - Oh hell no, that wasn't supposed to happen! Wnt (talk) 22:51, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's always better to write your own telnet client. Every session, for the best security. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:30, 2 April 2016 (UTC).[reply]

Hmm. So how long until Wikimedia provides a gopher server? Or does Tim's refusal to consider "a web gateway to the Telnet server" answer that question? -- llywrch (talk) 20:25, 3 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- If they need a copy of the source, I recommend using the Archie search engine. Praemonitus (talk) 21:45, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The temptation to actually download Tor and find if there's anything listening at that onion address is almost overwhelming. Lankiveil ^{(speak to me)} 10:51, 4 April 2016 (UTC).*[reply]
I thought "manpage" was a typo but the URL seems to suggest that's the correct spelling.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:11, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
If you're wondering what it looks like, check out my user page from nearly 5 years ago. In August, I created a Telnet IEG proposal for an nCurses-style Wikipedia interface. A month later, User:cscott built this simple scraper + telnet server in Node.js. — Dispenser 03:35, 17 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Where do I submit feature requests? This needs to be more like the old www browser that put [number] after each link and put a table-of-links at the end of every page. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:17, 27 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet/issues is a reasonable place to put feature requests and bug reports. C. Scott Ananian (talk) 18:45, 28 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The Signpost is written by editors like you – join in!