The Day the Telnet Died(labs.greynoise.io) |
The Day the Telnet Died(labs.greynoise.io) |
1. TELNET is an IETF-standard protocol defined by RFCs.
2. Telnet is a well-known port assigned by the IANA (tcp/23).
3. telnet is a client program, originated on Unix, available on many systems, and likely from a quite homogeneous codebase.
4. telnetd is a server program, also originated on Unix for the purpose of implementing Telnet protocol as a login server. Also a homogeneous codebase or two.
IIRC, the only traffic that was monitored and detected here is the scanning. The vulnerability scanners that try and detect, for better or worse, what someone's running on port 23, fingerprint it, and figure out if it's a vulnerability.
Interestingly, filtering port 23 only mitigates the CVE by happenstance. It is merely by convention that telnetd runs on port 23, so that people can use it to log in remotely. There is no constraint that requires port 23. Any other service could usurp 23/tcp for itself if the admin decrees it. So, filtering port 23 is an effective mitigation for the defaults of someone running a vulnerable server on the standard port. But it is not a panacea, and it doesn't prevent anyone from using the telnetd server, or the telnet client, except for port 23.
But it also prevents you from offering any service on port 23/tcp, lest it be filtered. You wouldn't want to run a web server, sshd, a MUD, or anything else, because your connectivity would be negatively impacted for this reason. (The common experience is that a lot of Windows SMB/NetBIOS ports are blocked, and SMTP and port 80, on a lot of consumer ISPs, although this is contrasting the ISP situation to Tier-1 transit carriers now.)
[1] nc (1) - arbitrary TCP and UDP connections and listens
[2] socat (1) - Multipurpose relay (SOcket CAT)
The modern replacement for telnet used in the "probe a port" fashion is nc/netcat.
I think about this quote a lot: given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
> Five entire countries vanished from GreyNoise telnet data: Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and Egypt. Not reduced — zero.
> An attacker sends -f root as the username value, and login(1) obediently skips authentication, handing over a root shell. No credentials required. No user interaction.
> The GreyNoise Global Observation Grid recorded a sudden, sustained collapse in global telnet traffic — not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function. One hour, ~74,000 sessions. The next, ~22,000.
> That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations.
(and I'm not just pointing these out because of the em dashes)
GPTZero (which is just another AI model that can have similar flaws and is definitely not infallible, but is at least another data point) rates my excerpts as 78% chance AI written, 22% chance of AI-human mix.
To me at least, the article still seems to be majority human-written, though.
Is there proof or evidence that it was never exploited in all of 10 years and remained as a latent zero-day?
The only saving grace I would propose, is that since telnetd has been aggressively deprecated once ssh became popular, and encryption became ubiquitous, and remote exploits became commonplace, and Starbucks WiFi was routinely surveilled, that telnetd simply wasn't running anywhere, anymore.
We have commenters saying that embedded systems and IoT used telnet servers. But were they running an actual GNU telnetd or just a management interface that answered on port 23/tcp? Commenters are citing statistics of "open port 23", but that means nothing in terms of this CVE, if it ain't GNU telnetd. Cisco has literally always used port 23 for management. Other routers and network devices use port 23 without telnetd.
How popular was GNU telnetd to be running on a system and exposed to the Internet? This article pertains to all the port-scanners running everywhere, so surely someone with a Shodan account can make a survey and tell us: who was still exposing GNU telnetd in 2026?
https://www.shodan.io/search/report?query=product%3Atelnetd+...
$ telnet smtp.example.co.uk 25
HELO me
MAIL FROM: gerdesj@example2.co.uk
RCPT TO: gerdesj@example.co.uk
DATA
A more "proper" tool for that is netcat -- I doubt SMTP supports the Telnet option negotiations subsystem. (I also doubt SMTP servers can interpret the full suite of Network Virtual Terminal (NVT) commands that the Telnet protocol supports.) There's clearly enough similarity between the two protocols that if you're just using it to transfer plaintext it will probably work out fine, but they are distinct protocols.
Never heard about https://jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/, thanks for the tip.
I find myself using curl telnet://server:port too often these days because telnet and nc don’t get installed.
GGP has a good eye.
However, anyone who knows the nature of CHARGEN would recognize that a singular successful connection could immediately blossom into a somewhat lackluster DDOS, as the chargen service risked consuming CPU and network resources unnecessarily.
chargen has been also aggressively deprecated, far more than telnetd, since it was a non-essential service. I'd like to know how many servers are voluntarily running chargen on the public Internet today.
A port-scan for chargen is more likely a comprehensive port-scan that is just attempting to identify and fingerprint anything that may have been established on that port. It would be less surprising to find, like, ssh or a web server occupying that space today.
and also the pattern:
> The most interesting thing here isn't the CVE… This is what mature security…
> The most interesting finding isn't that hyperbolic growth… This is Kuhnian paradigm…
both comments in the last 24h
I was admining a small ISP when blaster and its variants hit. Port filtering 139 and the rest was the easiest way to deal with it, and almost over night most of the ISPs blocked it, and we were better for it. There was a time when if you'd put a fresh XP install on the Internet you'd get 5-10 minutes until it would get restarted.
I guess if you're really an admin that needs telnet, you can move it to another port and go around it? Surely you'd tunnel that "old box that needs to stay alive" if that's the usecase? Is there anyone seriously running default telnet on 23 and is really affected by this filtering?
This may seem like a good idea, and frankly is likely a net-positive thing, but it is literally the definition of "ISP decides what apps its customers can and cannot use."
I share the concern and don't really like it either.
This is still true, though 5-10 minutes is slightly pessimistic. Source: https://youtu.be/6uSVVCmOH5w
TL;DW - Guy installs XP and makes it internet accessible, only takes 15 minutes before the first malware appears on it.
Filtering one port is not censorship. Not even close.
Great analysis, thank you!
New thread: Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980355
This is why everything converges on using TLS over 443 or a high port number. I don't see this as a huge deal, and especially not one deserving all caps rants about censorship. Save those for things like FOSTA/SESTA.
Is it on port 23/tcp, and what are the ASNs?
The report specifically says that cloud networks like VPS, AWS seemed exempt.
Anyway, just wild seeing this:
> telnet -l 'root -f' server.test
or
> USER='-f root' telnet -a server.test
Survive 11 years.
With port blocking widening in scope, I’ve long believed that we would one day have every service and protocol listening on port 443. Since all other ports are being knocked off in the name of security, we’ll end up having one port that makes port based filtering useless.
As are many other tools. But the ones above are basically far better direct telnet alternatives.
What's happened is that global routing on the internet (or big chunks of it, it's not really clear) has started blocking telnet's default port to protect presumably-unpatched/unpatchable dinosaur systems from automated attack. So you can no longer (probably) rely on getting to a SMTP server to deliver that spoofed email unless you can do it from its own local environment.
But that's 23 and smtp is 25.
(OK, I know one ancient talker that uses it - but on a very non-standard port so a port 23 block wouldn't be relevant)
It seems to use a different telnetd (busybox?), because from what I can tell it's not prone to this error.
Does this impact traffic for MUDs at all? I know several MUDs operate on nonstandard Telnet ports, but many still allow connection on port 23. Does this block end-to-end Telnet traffic, or does it only block attempts to access Telnet services on the backbone relays themselves?
It's crazy to think that some dude is singlehandedly responsible for ultimately ending the telnet era in such a definitive way.
One for the history books.
Well, one person to put up the PR and one dude to approve it - back in 2015. It isn't the security researcher's fault.
openssl s_client -connect www.yahoo.com:443Who?
Where's the commit?
Apparently the owners of that website don't like my choice of user agent, and have decided to punish me accordingly.
Do you mean that it's intentional? Why do you think so?
https://codeberg.org/inetutils/inetutils/commit/fa3245ac8c28...
One of the changes is:
- getterminaltype (char *user_name, size_t len)
+ getterminaltype (char *uname, size_t len)
* telnetd/utility.c (getterminaltype): Change the
name `user_name' to `uname', as the former shadows a precious
and global variable name.The present fix is to sanitize user input. Does it cover all cases?
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.
Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.
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.
ps.
telnet SDF.org
just works...
One of the most famous play choices at karaoke bars these days too. I think because the song is a long story, of sorts? But it's a terribly long song and I will leave to take a smoke break anytime it gets chosen. You're going to be there for a good 10 minutes before it concludes.
So maybe the AI prompt was something like, "take CVE-2026-24061 and compose a song lyric in the style of American Pie by Don Mclean". I wonder if you would get similar results with that prompt.
(Of course, the article only speculates that this traffic filtering is what's going on; there isn't any hard proof, but it feels plausible to me.)
https://i.imgur.com/tZoTWu6.png
Still seeing a sizable number of open ports but it's on the decline.
I haven't found evidence of extremely widespread filtering. Why would there be? The installation count is not that high. The potential side effects from uncoordinated port filtering could be quite severe. This isn't netkit's telnetd or Busybox. (I'm aware of Debian switching defaults, but that was fairly recently.)
Isn't this one of the remaining, "legit" uses of the Telnet protocol on TCP/23 port over the public Internet?
They're on a LAN behind a NAT Router/Firewall, and I don't always keep them powered up (I'm not that insane) so I really don't have a concern for them.
Some of the more modern/high-performance examples I have run NetBSD with modern sshd and modern ciphers, but you can tell it's a bit of a workout for them.
What I'd like to know is how the arguments get interpreted like that in the first place. If I try giving that kind of argument /usr/bin/login directly, its argument parser chides me:
$ login '-f root'
login: illegal option --
But '-f' is a valid option to login (man login):
login [-p] [-h host] [-H] [-f username|username]
...
-f Used to skip a login authentication. This option is usually used by the getty(8) autologin feature.
I asked them about it and they said it was a security measure. Apparently they used telnet for managing their routers.
It turned out that they did not have very good security anyway.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/domain-theft-strands-tho...
I switched to A2 hosting shortly after the above incident, but I dumped them when they did not keep up to date on their Ubuntu LTS OS options.
I've been running on AWS for the past eight years. It costs more, but it's been extraordinarily reliable.
A2 and AWS do not restrict port 23.
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A23
Or to filter by product:telnetd
https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Atelnetd
A query of "telnet" searches Shodan for banners where the "data" property contains the string "telnet":
I think we all collectively decided that that was a bad idea at some point — probably because /bin/login was never designed under the assumption that it would have to deal with arbitrary binary network traffic being thrown at it (it really only expects keyboard input.) So we switched to doing auth directly in our network daemons, since at least then “people who are aware the code is network-facing” would be maintaining it.
2. give up root because you don't need it any further.
3. Only accept non-root logins
4. when a user creates a session, if they need root within the session they can obtain it via sudo or su.
I suppose it could be via a proper PAM module, which is widely supported.
Too bad the first PAM RFC was published about the same time the first be version of ssh was released.
One can disable root login via SSH in /etc/ssh/sshd_config. sshd also drops root priviledges once it's running IIRC.
I use use sudo or doas as a regular user once logged in.
Sshing as a regular user and then sudo to root works 95% of the time…
btw if you want a quick telnet client, and an old python happens to be installed, you can use `python -m telnetlib IP`
However, if you still long for nostalgia, I was able to access it over IPv6 using a VPN based in the Netherlands:
telnet 2001:7b8:666:ffff::1:42
But adoption stalled when the original SSH moved to a commercial license in 1996-ish - many of us stuck with the last free version, but vulnerabilities started to pile up. There were various half-working alternatives, but it wasn't until OpenSSH came out in 1999 that the remaining telnet holdouts started to move across.
We used telnet in college no problem. It was a fairly well-accepted method of remote access. The heterogeneous network had many different modes, but a major dialup point was the Annex box, which supported telnet into the Unix or VMS machines.
Between Unix machines, we would often prefer "rlogin" instead. There were several horrific iterations of other remote-access protocols such as "remsh". rlogin was notorious for its "/etc/hosts.equiv" authorization method which trusted DNS and should've been perceived as Swiss Cheese from the outset. rlogin was, IIRC, directly related to rsh and rcp and used the same frameworks. rlogin was no more secure than telnet, but probably less secure because of its conveniences.
We also used port 23/tcp for remote management, for example Cisco routers. They weren't running telnetd, but it was the port where you connected remotely and logged in with or without credentials.
rlogin persisted alongside telnet, until encryption came into fashion and ssh was distributed. Once ssh was available and working well, everyone knew that telnetd and rlogind were on borrowed time. The services were shut down and disabled in inetd. The ports were sometimes blocked. Security advisories went out.
I suppose it took a long, long time for ssh to finally dominate, and for people to abandon telnetd mostly, but it was fairly thorough. We all recognized the superiority of sshd's authentication and encrypted channels.
There were mitigations for people to extend their legacy use of telnetd and rlogind. For example, tcp wrappers and fail2ban could be implemented. Firewall filters could select only authorized networks. VPNs could tunnel through an Intranet that still used them. So, the services lived on wherever they didn't need to be exposed on the public Internet. But I think most Unix admins got the picture by the end of the dot-com bubble.
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhcf6tc2jeQ
(Remember hearing about this a long time ago (from some searching I think it was in 1999 via Slashdot) and verified some instance of it still exists/works.)
If you investigate most commercial uses of ssh, the security is disabled or ignored. Nobody verifies host keys, and with automation where hosts cycle, you basically have to disable verification as there's no easy way around the host keys constantly changing. Without host key verification, there's kinda no point to the rest.
Even assuming the host keys were verified, the popular ssh conventions are to use either long-lived static keys (and almost nobody puts a password on theirs), or a password. Very few people use SSH with 2FA, and almost no-one uses ephemeral keys (OIDC) or certificates (which many people screw up).
So in terms of how people actually use it, SSH is one of the least secure transport methods. You'd be much more secure by using telnet over an HTTPS websocket with OAuth for login.
The known_hosts file is verification of host keys. It's not verification of a host cert, which is a different thing. Most sshd instances are running on ad hoc hardware without the ability to associate them with someone a cert authority would be willing to authenticate.
Basically people running services that need cert-based authentication are already using TLS (or if they're using sshd they've locked it down appropriately). SSH is for your workstation and your RPi and whatnot.
The problem with IoT and embedded secrets isn't really a solved problem, from what I can tell. I'm not sure that OAuth exactly solves the problem here. Though all your comments about SSH (especially host verification) holds true.
Just honestly trying to understand the possible solution space to the IoT problem and automated (non-human) authorization.
I'd say that HTTPS (or TLS in general) is more problematic, since you need to trust numerous root CAs in machine/browser store. Sure, you can use certificate pinning, but that has the same issues as SSH host key verification.
PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001 each either highly recommend or enforce this.
I wouldn't use a jumphost without it.
IMHO we need a good telnet replacement that sends signed data. Most people interpret signatures as allowed under FCC rules, just not encryption.
I know from bitter experience that IPsec is a “now you have two problems” kind of solution, but the Authentication Header is a thing and is supported by most (all?) implementations. Ham radio operators probably don’t have much use for the actual features of telnet compared to plain netcat, do they? (It’s mostly terminal feature negotiation and such.)
I'm breaking a tonne of FCC rules right now.
I really should update it to allow more secure options
Not anymore ;)
Seriously though: did you notice any spikes up or down?
If you'd run it on a non-standard port, anyone can still connect with netcat, socat, etc etc.
All of that was foundational for my career and I still look back fondly on the technology of the time, which tended to be fairly "open" to exploration by curious-minded teenagers.
The problem is the auth is plain text too and you're open to having your credentials stolen.
telnet doom.w-graj.net 666MUDs use plaintext TCP protocols that are accessible to a wide range of clients.
The Telnet protocol is well-defined and not completely plaintext. There are in-band signaling methods and negotiations. Telnet is defined to live on 23/tcp as an IANA well-known, privileged, reserved port.
MUDs do none of this. You can usually connect to a MUD using a Telnet client, but most players hate the experience and often deride this method in favor of a dedicated, programmable client.
The fact that MUDs inhabit higher 4-digit ports is an artifact from their beginnings as unprivileged, user-run servers without a standardized protocol or an assigned “well-known port” presence. If you want your MUD to be particularly inaccessible, you could certainly run on port 23 now!
Most MUDs implement RFC 854, and a number of non-standard Telnet option subnegotiation protocols have been adopted for compression (MCCP2), transmission of unrendered data (ATCP, GMCP, ZMP), and even a mechanism for enabling marking up the normal content using XML-style tags (MXP). These telopts build on the subnegotiation facility in standard Telnet, whose designers knew that the base protocol would be insufficient for many needs; there are a great number of IANA-controlled and standardized telopt codes that demonstrate this, and the MUD community has developed extensions using that same mechanism.
> You can usually connect to a MUD using a Telnet client, but most players hate the experience and often deride this method in favor of a dedicated, programmable client.
I think you are confusing "telnet" the program with "telnet" the protocol. I am speaking here of the protocol, defined at base in RFC 854, for which "telnet" the program is but one particularly common implementation. You look at any of those "dedicated, programmable clients" and they will contain an implementation of RFC 854, probably also an implementation of RFC 1143 (which nails down the rules of subnegotiation in order to prevent negotiation loops), and an implementation of the RFCs for several standard telopts as well as non-standardized MUD community telopts. I can speak for the behavior of MUSHclient in especial regard here, though I am also familiar with the underlying Telnet nature of Mudlet, ZMud, and CMUD, not to mention my very own custom-made prototype client for which I very much needed to implement Telnet as described above.
MOOs do.
Since Telnet is totally plain text that would absolutely be easy to do right?
That said in this day and age, servers on the public network really ought to use SSH.
Well, maybe not a bank.
From ASN AS11427 (Charter Communications Inc) to ASN AS12859 (BIT BV) and to ASN AS14361 (HopOne Internet Corporation)
(edit: formatting)
I don't know what 11 years ago has to do with anything, besides the awful lifespan of such a severe bug.
> giant security flaw
Checks out.
It is not the responsibility of the Tier 1 or the ISP to configure your server securely, it is their responsibility to deliver the message. Therefore it is an overreach to block it because you might be insecure. What is next. They block the traffic to your website because you run PHP?
Similar to how the mailman is obligated to deliver your letter at address 13 even though he personally might be very superstitious and believe by delivering the mail to that address bad things will happen.
But let's say I agree: That still is not censorship.
Net-neutrality law doesn't work like that. Service providers still get to filter stuff.
What's illegal for an ISP is e.g. to give VoIP services other than their own a lower priority. That would tie in customers to use their own service and they could even charge more for it. Net neutrality means a level playing field for services on the Internet.
If you ask your ISP to do filtering, that's perfectly legal. If they filter specific traffic for the purpose of maintaining service, that's okay too.
Now if there was no alternative and they'd try to sell their product by blocking telnet, they could be sued.
Which was mildly annoying workaround for the power users (disabling it was just changing the ppp login), but stopped a lot of accidentally open open relays and a lot of other cruft
> If netcat is compiled with -DTELNET, the -t argument enables it to respond to telnet option negotiation [always in the negative, i.e. DONT or WONT]. This allows it to connect to a telnetd and get past the initial negotiation far enough to get a login prompt from the server. Since this feature has the potential to modify the data stream, it is not enabled by default. You have to understand why you might need this and turn on the #define yourself.
To actually pass the certification test suite on a real system, Apple sometimes needs to apply special configurations (e.g., disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP), using case-sensitive filesystem, enabling certain legacy services, etc.).
telnet(1) is not required by POSIX (nor is nc or ssh required!)
Ironically, telnet(1) did not begin as a "Unix" utility but an ARPANET protocol suite program. It was available cross-platform. It is unclear whether all editions of Unix included a client, but BSD for sure was the point where telnet and TCP/IP became essential integrations for the systems.
So exhausting to be surrounded by people with a paranoid, irrational fear of robots, who don't give a shit who they harm in their zeal to lash out and strike the evil bots.
Compare that to malware that just copies a developer's ssh private key off the disk (again, almost nobody ever password protects theirs). This just happened recently on a massive scale with the npm attacks. Or intercepts the first connection from a client host and, again, because nobody ever validates keys, injects a false host key, and now they're pwnd indefinitely. Or, again, companies that do not strictly validate host keys, meaning immediate MitM. There's like a dozen ways to compromise SSH. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is that way, because of how people use it.
Ah, the memories.
cat '+ +' >> /etc/hosts.equiv
It makes no sense that IPv6 is treated differently than IPv4. If GNU telnetd is vulnerable and it's running on port 23/tcp, it will be found on IPv6. I would definitely not bind anything to listen on port 23 on any protocol, because I would expect it to become filtered shortly. Port 23 is permanently burned everywhere.
Conversely, a vintage PDP-10 telnetd is not affected by the CVE for GNU.
It is a classic rookie mistake to treat the two protocols differently, so if Tier-1 providers have done this, they must be overly optimistic, or foolish, or met with some technical obstacles, or perhaps OSI Layer 8?
Since 23/tcp is a well-known IANA-registered port for the Telnet service, it is an RFC violation to use it for a service that is not telnetd/remote logins via TELNET protocol.
Any port below 1024 signifies that it is a "privileged port". This is an archaic distinction that developed in high-trust R&E networks, but it did signify that the listener on the port had administrative/root access to spawn a service there, so it was kind of a signal that you could "trust" the remote server with your login credentials.
The privileged ports were also priority, because if the unprivileged ones were "first come, first served" for unprivileged users, the administrator would have the ability to enforce the uniqueness of "privileged ports", and disable or kill any process that shouldn't be using one. A MUD Wizard who finds their port in-use (bound) on start is on their own.
Typically there were no MUDs running with, or needing, root privileges. They were run under user accounts, or specific unprivileged role accounts. They had no need of a privileged port, and many were clandestine or unauthorized, and forced to use a higher port number. That's why the 4-digit ports became so popular.
Anyway, the custom has already developed of blocking port 23 to protect users from unwittingly opening a management or login interface. Most shrewd admins would choose a port that isn't routinely blocked and filtered... and port-scanned.
If your favorite MUD runs on port 23 today, such as nethack or something, then I am glad for this change, which will force the administrator to select a unique port that does not imply privilege, TELNET protocol, or shell login credentials. It is totally RFC-compliant to select an unassigned port above 1023, and MUD conventions have popularized several numbers that are still recognizable to players today.
You're saying that connecting my tty (emulator), to a remote host is not the purpose of telnet?
<backs away slowly>
Though ... I suppose by now a switch to port 22 could make sense.
The end of RFC854, the very last paragraph, states:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc854
Port Assignment
When used for remote user access to service hosts (i.e., remote
terminal access) this protocol is assigned server port 23
(27 octal). That is L=23.
A MUD game could never be confused with managing the server where it runs, or a user/admin login to access that operating system. A MUD game has a specific purpose of recreation/leisure/communication.
Again, let us not conflate port 23 with telnetd with the TELNET protocol. These are all completely separate and distinct. Except that port 23/tcp implies TELNET protocol and also implies a telnetd-type server. It is sort of a one-way chain of requirement. telnetd could be run on any port (inadvisable) while TELNET protocol could be implemented by any other service (often preferable).
A MUD server is perfectly entitled to use TELNET protocol! In my server-hacking days, I often considered it a mistake and error not to support TELNET protocol! If I had known how to implement it, I would've added it to TinyMUCK myself! Honestly, it was not a priority because there was no known client supporting TELNET, either. Of course, protocol support needs to be on both ends to be effective. Without demand or capability from clients, it didn't really make sense for server programmers to add it in.
But we were perfectly content to stay on port 2283, port 4201, or port 6250, as our players and Wizards had established the games to run there, especially in those days we wished to escape notice by admins. The TELNET protocol can run on any port and support any "network virtual terminal" service. But the "telnet port" on 23 is special, unique, and as of last month, really inadvisable for everyone.
I hate to break it to you, but RFC violations power the internet.
Also, RFCs are non-binding and the IANA port numbers are just strongly suggested.
If something is running on a privileged port is not enough to trust it. Firstly you need to trust to a host, you need to know where are you connecting to. If you connect to a random host with a privileged port and pass it your credentials you are doing stupid things.
This thing with privileged ports is protecting you from users who could run arbitrary code on a server. From them and not from anyone else. So for MUD there is a lot of reasons to run on 23 port, it is a signal for users of MUD that they are connecting to a process hat was started by the owner of the machine having the root.
> If your favorite MUD runs on port 23 today, such as nethack or something, then I am glad for this change, which will force the administrator to select a unique port that does not imply privilege, TELNET protocol, or shell login credentials. It is totally RFC-compliant to select an unassigned port above 1023, and MUD conventions have popularized several numbers that are still recognizable to players today.
If I was running a MUD, I would find some way to get around. I could use 22 for example, though it could cause me problems with logging in with ssh. But it is not an issue really, there are 1k privileged ports, I could choose one from them.
Just dont mess with: GPS, Airline radio, cell phones, broadcast infra, emergency services
If you're blowing double the power for ISM, nobody cares. Your PEP using a yagi is 4x what is legal? Unless you piss off a ham, nobody cares.
And even if you are a ham, and are using 150KHz bandwidth with low power in, say 50MHz (regulation says 40KHz max), again, nobody cares.
And also if above 6GHz (common SDR top end), nobody will notice. The equipment up there is $$$$$.
But damn, you want to piss off hams? Mention bitrate maximums or encryption. You'll never hear the end from the old gatekeeping idiots.
So much gatekeeping.
Incidentally, I have it Word From On High within Ofcom here in the UK that you literally cannot pay them to take an interest in what happens on the amateur bands.
There's "breaking the law" and there's "being a bit rude", the latter of which might be things like "hey let's do fastscan TV on 70cm and use about half the allocation!" You do have to watch with 70cm in the UK though because amateur radio is a secondary user, with primary users being the armed forces. But it's 10MHz wide and there's space for everyone to play.
Putting the 70cm packet BBS channel 5kHz above where all the car alarm keyfobs work was a bit silly though.
As regards microwave stuff, I've got some scrap 26GHz stuff at work that can apparently be tuned to 24GHz by swapping the cavity tuning screw for one of the slightly longer ODU outer cover screws, and tweaking a setting in the EEPROM in Factory Never Touch This Shit mode. Want to bet they had radio amateurs working for them?
Because on their own, MUDs aren't nerdy enough, amateur radio isn't nerdy enough, and indeed packet radio isn't nerdy enough.
Eventually we decided we'd had our fun and now I needed to the TNC for something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Kingdom_reinforced...
https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/raac-crisis...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/31/what-is-ra...
We are beyond the point where not putting infrastructure equipment behind a firewall should result in a fine. It's beyond the point that this is negligence.
Fixing the hospital: single place to work on, easier
Blocking all the roads/flights: everywhere, harder
Vs
Fixing all the telnet: everywhere, harder/impossible
Blocking port 23 on an infra provider: single place, easier
It makes sense to me to favor the realistic solution that actually works vs the unrealistic one which is guaranteed not fix the issue, especially when it's much easier to implement
"Not X, not Y, not Z" is a common LLM tic, and there's a few more like it in there.
* 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.
No, you already own this capital equipment. It's the laptops running macOS that are ephemeral and disposable.
I don't care for excuses or workarounds; why did they do it?
It was an explicit decision whilst leaving a lot more—arguably more useless—garbage in.
Every OS that removed telnet did so for a symbolic reason, not because it was helpful technically.
99% of Mac users never use it, directly or indirectly. Asking that they have it anyway is a self centric view.
It just isn’t installed by default when 99% of users have no desire for it.
I want EVERYTHING that I might use installed AT ALL TIMES, FROM DAY ONE, so that I can IMMEDIATELY USE IT when required.
This is only one of many reasons why I abandoned the giant dumpster fire that is mainstream Linux. I do not agree with their idiotic philosophy, on practically every level.
You've now discovered that there are sections of God's Green Earth that you never knew existed! One of many benefits of stepping outside the Matrix for a moment.
As a MUD enthusiast for 37 years, I learned to program in C and Unix through TinyMUD, MUCK, and MUSH derived servers. From the beginning, none of these codebases implemted Telnet. There was nothing but a raw transparent TCP connection. In fact, I facilitated the introduction of a grand innovation: the "port concentrator" system which multiplexed TCP connections. Unix processes had a hard rlimit of 64 file descriptors, which crimped our style as an emerging MMORPG. The multiplexer increased this to 4096, for the biggest games of the era.
You mention MUSHclient, and I do not know about later revisions of the TinyMUSH server, but I can assure you that every MUSH I found from Larry Foard on, was not implementing Telnet. (I was privileged to help Larry "test" new features as I red-teamed his server with bizarre edge cases!)
Likewise, after I handed off TinyMUCK 2.3 to the furries, it was not doing the Telnet protocol. When we backported stuff to MUCK 1.x, it was not doing Telnet. I wrote a bonkers Perl program to read MUCK databases and sort of implement the game. No Telnet there. I've got to wonder whether the Ubermud or MOO guys had folded it in; they were close collaborators with us, back in the day.
Now as for the Diku, LP, and other “combat” type games, I’ve no idea. Perhaps they did. We never cared. I was aware that some of them had a pesky “prompt” that violated the line-mode assumptions of conventional clients and needed workarounds.
telnet(1), the program, was historically the only program that implemented the protocol. If you use Tinyfugue or Tinywar or tinymud.el, they are not, and no, I am not confused, because I was giving an example of why the Telnet-implementation, the program, the client, was so inadequate for playing on MUD servers.
It wouldn’t have been difficult to retrofit the Telnet RFC 854 into any MUD server, but none of us wizards had any use for it, seeing that our clients were mature and capable of much more processing without it.
If modern MUD servers have mostly implemented Telnet, then that is cool, but what surprises me is that it is mandatory, and your clients don’t seem to interoperate without it? That is a strange reversal!
Further, most older clients did not anticipate any kind of Telnet negotiation from the server, and will print garbage to the screen if connecting to modern MUSHes that do. (I've tested tinywar, vt, and that one VMS client...)
MUCKs never, to my knowledge, implemented telnet, though. They barely support ANSI escapes, nevermind Telnet. :-)
Then this is at the heart of our disconnect, because the post of mine that you originally replied to --- as well as, unless I drastically misread, the original article under discussion --- was concerned with traffic on port 23, the Telnet protocol port, and not with any particular implementation communicating on that port. The concern of my original comment was that this might affect MUDs that operate on port 23. Perhaps you can understand my confusion when you reply stating categorically that most MUDs do not use "Telnet" (meaning the program), when that wasn't really what was at concern (and therefore implied that my question had no basis).
It is a true fact that many MUDs operate on port 23. Many do not, but you can skim a MUD aggregator like MudConnect [0] to see that it is quite common. Aardwolf, Discworld MUD, and the IRE games --- which consistently topped TopMudSites (when that aggregator was still running, anyway) all operate on 23, potentially in addition to an unreserved port.
> what surprises me is that it is mandatory, and your clients don’t seem to interoperate without it? That is a strange reversal!
All telopts are disabled by default, per Telnet RFC; the only things you must absolutely parse under the RFC are the standard complement of NVT commands (such as IAC GA "Go Ahead"), even if they are otherwise implemented as no-ops.
Any input stream with the high bit clear is treated as pure data -- with the incidental exception of bare `\r`, which must always be followed either by `\n` or by `\0`; but Postel's Law has turned that into more of a guideline. So as long as the standard NVT encoding is assumed (which is just 7-bit ASCII) and the NVT core escape sequences are avoided, a modern Telnet-based MUD client can interoperate with a plaintext MUD server without issue. (As you know, this is also why people get away with using `telnet` (the program) to access HTTP and SMTP services instead of using something like netcat.)
Some MUD clients will eagerly send IAC DO / IAC WILL subnegotiations, but general practice is to let the server offer first -- probably precisely to ensure compatibility with MUDs that don't implement Telnet subnegotiations.
> Now as for the Diku, LP, and other “combat” type games, I’ve no idea
Diku-family MUDs are certainly the ones I have the most experience with. I understand LP MUDs also generally have Telnet support; or at least, I recall seeing a patch for them that MUD owners often sought to apply to their games.
[0]: https://www.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?mode=tmc_bigli...
Telnet is mostly used for auth and straightforward terminal/BBS access in my experience. There are some other alternatives like HamSSH but I don’t think it’s that common.
Telnet, on the other hand, is quite a bit fancier than that and has a fairly involved feature negotiation mechanism for terminal connections that is not entirely in line with the prevalent DEC tradition. As admittedly one of the funkiest examples of what you can do with it, there is for instance a mode[1] where the client is asked to emulate a terminal of the IBM 3270 lineage. (To a practicioner of the aforementioned DEC tradition, those feel like the marsupials of terminals: everything is functionally there, but primitive and derived are occasionally flipped and some features are oddly weak or misdesigned due to a lack of competition.) So if you do actually use Telnet the protocol, by all means, I’ll be delighted to learn what you do with it (partly why I asked in the first place). But if you just need a pipe, then TCP is enough, and netcat or socat make fine ad-hoc clients.
Roads: a lot more places than that.
The core of the analogy holds.
You presumably want them to run as any (non root) user. The capability you need for that, to impersonate arbitrary (non-root) users on the system, is pretty damn close to being root.
These days we have netcat/socat and others, but they're not reliably installed, while telnet used to be generally available because telnetting to another machine was more common.
These days, the answer would be to use a netcat variant. In the past, telnet was the best we could be confident would be there.
The ports are there for a reason, it is idiotic to serve everything over http as you would need a mechanism to distinguish the different flows of traffic anyhow.
We can either have a standard and accept that bad actors will use it against us, or we can accept the chaos that results from abandoning it.
I think this is an acceptable alternative. In the same way that your mail service is legally required to deliver your mail as part of their universal service obligation (without reading it).
Reverse proxies can disambiguate based on the SNI. I could run telnetd on port 23, but have port 23 firewalled off, and have my reverse proxy listening on port 443 with TLS forward anything going to telnet.mydomain.com to telnetd. Obviously, my client would need to support that, but a client-side proxy could easily handle that just as well.
You would need to agree on a protocol and you would gain all the advantages but also the disadvantages of the tunneling protocol.
Protocol multiplexing/demultiplexing is a feature of software like sslh, nginx, and HAProxy exist, and they don't need to listen on multiple ports to speak multiple protocols or connect multiple services. Many advanced reverse proxies can do this with stream sniffing of some flavor.
People already do actually run everything through port 443 simultaneously.
If you route all your traffic through https that comes with all the upsides, for example the security layer (ssl). But also the downsides of for example overhead of headers. Currently we have an overarching (network layer) protocol, it is called IP. It divides the traffic into different ports at the host, these ports speak different protocols. If you move the multiplexing higher up the OSI stack, you are violating the principles of separation and making your stack less flexible, you are mixing OSI layers 4: transport up to 6: Presentation. Conflicting these layers can lead to big problems as this includes things like the Transport layer, for example the difference between udp/tcp is included there.
The beauty of the network stack is that there are certain layers that separate responsibility. This allows the stack to apply to wildly different scenarios. However I do agree that there should be no filtering applied on behalf of the customers.
It doesn't matter what user it is running as.
If this was so easy to deal with, someone would have done it. Instead, we get endless HN comments about people that act like they can do better but never submit a PR.
>If this was so easy to deal with, someone would have done it.
Sadly this is not the case. There is a lot of inertia towards solutions like ssh or sudo. It may be easy to delete them, but actually getting such a changed accepted is no trivial task.
Yes, but potentially any login. See the problem? If you compromise the gatekeeper, you are now the keymaster. Or whatever :)
The point is that a "private" cert is not a "cert" as commonly understood. The important part to a certification authority is the AUTHORITY part, not the data format. Either there is a trusted third party that will promise you are who you say you are, or there is not. With SSH, there is not, nor can there be as it is commonly deployed.
So applications that want that have used other protocols and other schemes, very productively.
>The known_hosts file is verification of host keys
I think the point was that those devices typically generate host keys dynamically and therefore the host key verification is usually turned off, leaving you just with encryption (which is still better than telnet - at least you're safe against passive adversaries). At least that's what I've seen in practice.
ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null root@192.168...
Two things:
1. Only if they knew that the hostname in question is indeed being used for telnet tunneling. You can set that host name to whatever you want.
2. Encrypted SNI is a thing.
> You would need to agree on a protocol and you would gain all the advantages but also the disadvantages of the tunneling protocol.
Yeah, admittedly the entire thing is a bit contrived. If your client is capable of speaking the tunneling protocol, then likely you'd just use the tunneling protocol itself, rather than using it to tunnel telnet.
I may be misunderstanding your message here, but the requirement to agree on a single protocol isn't true when you're using multiplexing. I think you're confusing tunneling with multiplexing.
With multiplexing, you have multiple protocols listening on a single port. The multiplexer server sniffs the first few bytes of what the client sends to determine what protocol is being used, then decides which back-end to forward the connection to.
Neither the client nor the final back-end need to be aware that multiplexing is happening, and likely aren't.
Through this, you can use both HTTPS and Telnet on port 443 without the Telnet client needing to have any changes done.
Someone has already pointed out that old/deprecated/obsolete software like a telnet client represent tech debt.
Removing the telnet client was, in part, a recognition that its complementary server was deprecated and unsafe. If everyone was transitioned to ssh and nc, [and custom MUD clients], why keep telnet around?
Any software like this represents tech debt and a support burden for the upstreams and distros which carry them. You have unnecessarily assumed a burden in this way.
Furthermore, ask the maintainers of OpenBSD or any hardened OS about attack surfaces. The more software that you cram into the default distribution, the more bundled features an OS or system has, you are multiplying your potential vulnerabilities, your zero-days, and your future CVE/patch updates.
Especially in the face of growing supply-chain attacks and LLM-automated vulnerability disclosure. Your focus should be on limiting attack surface in every regard.
It is good practice for everyone to uninstall unnecessary apps and software. Whether you use Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, BeOS or Plan9 or Inferno. Do not install and maintain software that you do not use or need. It will come back to bite you.
OpenBSD still ships with telnet.
Their developers don't entertain nonsense virtue signaling about things that are "unsafe" and they know their users are not idiots that need to be coddled.
Hammers and matches are unsafe if you use them wrong.
And you are? Completely mystified as to why you'd think I would care. I built this distro for me and my people, not you. That's the whole point. We're getting off this ride.
> Someone has already pointed out that old/deprecated/obsolete software like a telnet client represent tech debt.
Not a subscriber to this religion. There is nothing about new software that inherently makes it safe, and nothing about old software that inherently makes it vulnerable.
New flaws are introduced all the time, and old bugs do get found and fixed.
I can patch old code. I can't guarantee that new code doesn't contain bugs.
The ONLY way to ensure code is flawless is through validation--mathematical proof. When you have devised a proof framework that I can use across my distro, get back to me. At this time you're nowhere near that level, and are therefore unqualified to lecture anyone about security.
> Removing the telnet client was, in part, a recognition that its complementary server was deprecated and unsafe.
Unsafe? On my personal LAN? I think not.
You don't get to just 'deprecate' things that I might need, or want to use for perfectly valid reasons.
That's the entire point of my distro: computing the way I WANT IT, not the way Ubuntu wants it.
> If everyone was transitioned to ssh and nc, [and custom MUD clients], why keep telnet around?
Because it's 172 kilobytes. Contrast with the giant bloated carcass of everything else they shove in there that's oh-so-needed by the herd.
> Any software like this represents tech debt and a support burden for the upstreams and distros which carry them. You have unnecessarily assumed a burden in this way.
I'm a distro maintainer. Hello? Telnet represents ZERO maintenance burden for me. There are no operators standing by on hotlines to "support" any of this. It's a 172 kilobyte utility.
> Furthermore, ask the maintainers of OpenBSD or any hardened OS about attack surfaces. The more software that you cram into the default distribution, the more bundled features an OS or system has, you are multiplying your potential vulnerabilities, your zero-days, and your future CVE/patch updates.
Nobody can magically teleport themselves inside my computer and compromise my telnet client. Nobody is injecting packets into my LAN.
> Especially in the face of growing supply-chain attacks and LLM-automated vulnerability disclosure. Your focus should be on limiting attack surface in every regard.
You're concerned about supply chain attacks, so your mitigation is...doubling down on getting the Latest Updates to everything? Because new code is inherently good.
Telnet has to go--way too risky to keep that around--but KDE/Gnome/systemd/dbus/etc stays?
'traceroute' is useless and dangerous, but let's keep the giant QT framework with its vendored copy of Chromium? (That's QT5 and QT6, each with a vendored Chromium, mind you.)
Chromium, by the way, itself represents tens of gigabytes of code/data now inside its repository, with 'third party' directories vendored three or even four levels deep. But a 72k traceroute utility is likely to be packed with security flaws and should be avoided.
> It is good practice for everyone to uninstall unnecessary apps and software. Whether you use Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, BeOS or Plan9 or Inferno. Do not install and maintain software that you do not use or need. It will come back to bite you.
Completely wrong and misleading theory of security you are proposing here.
I devised this new distro exactly because I was tired of my computing experience being shaped and controlled by clueless kids with intellectually bankrupt arguments and/or wolves in sheeps' clothing.
You talk about me, my, mine, my network, my computer. But you're promoting a "distro". That means you're distributing software. It's not yours anymore.
Attackers on a network will use techniques to "pivot". Once a "foothold" is established then they scan for other places to attack. They will indeed get inside "your" computer, or router, and then compromise your telnetd.
It comes back to the liberty of swinging your arms vs. the proximity to my nose. If your distro is connected to a network, then you're responsible and accountable for security issues that result. There are thousands of distro kiddies sending out their favorite flavor of Linux, but how many audited it like Theo de Raadt?
You don't seem to understand the CVE under discussion. It doesn't even affect telnet(1). Practically nobody runs telnetd(8) anymore since the introduction of encryption, ssh, and the like. MUD players use MUD clients. Network admins use nc(1). The reason "telnet" was deprecated is: it's just not really useful anymore without its complementary service. telnet(1) isn't inherently dangerous, it's just superfluous, and distros pretty much evaluated that it wasn't worth hanging on to.
As for "traceroute", I'm not sure it's "useless or dangerous", but it can be misleading and definitely superfluous. It is widely misinterpreted by novices trying to prove something about their WAN connectivity. It misrepresents network topology and doesn't work real good with modern equipment or protocols. It was a judicious decision to bundle it with network debugging tools, because not everyone needs to debug networks. Especially the ones who believe that they can.
I would say that any network debugging tool available is also useful to your attackers with a foothold. A "living off the land" attack will leverage your telnet client, will run traceroutes on your network, and they will use all the software cruft that you didn't uninstall! I am pretty sure there are distros that simply don't come with development environments, C compilers, or various interpreters anymore, and it is for this reason: they are not inherently insecure or vulnerable, but "living off the land" will weaponize them every time.
However, I must concede that your temperament and tone is well-suited to being a distro administrator. You remind me of Linus Torvalds vs. Andrew Tanenbaum, or Theo de Raadt vs. FreeBSD. Perhaps Scott Adams vs. the world. Carry on, good sir.
1. https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/02/01/python-c...
- OpenIndiana
- FreeBSD
- Debian GNU/Linux
So not complete YOLO.
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-inetutils/2015-03/msg...
FWIW, a well known LLM agent, when I asked for a review of the patch, did suggest it was dodgy but didn't pick up the severity of how dodgy it was.
Which one?
As a data point, my first tech job was QA for a COBOL compiler vendor. They supported roughly 600 permutations of architecture, operating system, and OS version with a byte-coded runtime and compiler written in C. I maintained a test runner and suite with many thousands of tests, ranging from unit tests to things like Expect UI tests. This was considered routine in the compiler vendor field, and in the scientific computing space I moved into. I worked with someone who independently reproduced the famous Pentium FDIV bug figuring out why their tests failed, which surprised no one because that was just expected engineering.
Then you had the other end of the industry where there was, say, 50k lines of Visual Basic desktop app where they didn’t even use version control software. At a later job, I briefly encountered a legacy system which had 30 years of that where they had the same routine copied in half a dozen places, modified slightly because when the author had fixed a bug they weren’t sure if it would break something else so they just created a copy and updated just the module they were working on.
In this case the hero's name is apparently Simon Josefsson (maintainer).
Ah, someone beat me to it!
/s
What do you think of [], highlights: It is extremely tightly integrated with the system. Connections are handled by telnetd, and the interface is basically considered a shell by the system. MUD characters are treated as actual users by the system, with a UNIX username consisting of "m-" followed by the first 5 characters of their selected character name. The database is stored as directories and files, with occasional symlinks.
Any programming or scripting language which is capable of manipulating Mooix's data files can be used to write custom commands, in a similar idea to, say, CGI. Libraries have been created to aid in this for several languages, including Perl, C, Ruby, and bash.
When a character is enabled as a programmer, they basically get the amount of power normally associated with a shell account. They can create and execute files, evaluate perl scripts, and can access a simplified version of a standard UNIX shell, among other benefits. Facilities are provided to edit Mooix scripts or programs (using your favorite editor) from within the MUD, then set them up to be executed when a user types a certain command.
It is a horse of a different color when user logins are handled by telnetd itself. I would imagine that access could also be provided by ssh. I know of no MUD that supports MFA, public/private keys, and host certificates!
At any rate, as of January 2026, Mooix users are gonna have a tough time connecting on port 23/tcp. I won't say they've been wrong for using it until now, but they may find themselves forced to switch to ssh, or at least a 4-digit port number. And patch that GNU telnetd ASAP, man.
EDIT: Sad to say, please do not visit the website cited in this linked article. It is, how you say, squatted by purveyors of smut. It may be the case that Mooix is abandonware.
First thing I ever telnetted to was Melvyl, University of California's library catalogue, around 1985. This was “remote user access” (I was a remote user) to “service hosts” (running the catalogue) providing “remote terminal access”. It was not a login.
I would suggest that MELVYL on port 23/tcp was also unnecessarily impinging on the IETF standards. MELVYL could have easily established its own well-known port with the IANA and not conflicted with the TELNET login port.
Before the WWW, there were a multiplicity of search services and indexes. Remember Archie, WAIS, and Gopher? Apparently, WAIS was assigned port 210/tcp, but Archie apparently used TELNET on 23/tcp as well.
I think some of the pioneering Internet services were perceived as not requiring a dedicated port. If MELVYL was the only service running on the mainframe and it wasn't running a Unix telnetd, then why not usurp 23/tcp? The admins there probably perceived it as a virtual "octopus cable" connecting remote "terminal labs", and for sure they had alternate methods of access for OS servicing and configuration purposes. In the beginning of MELVYL they were undecided about which protocol would prevail, and TCP/IP was competing with others, so port numbers may have been afterthoughts for the architects.
The most important thing may have been the principle of not surprising users or confusing them with parameters. "telnetting to a host" was way easier without trying to specify that they needed a port number. Just ask any Unix admin where MUD users try to bang on their telnetd port trying to play the game...
For the longest time in the 90s TELNET AYT would crash tons of custom implementations.
mudplayer:x:1001:1001:MUD Player:/home/mudplayer:/usr/games/adventureThose are two different things, and you're confusing or conflating them.
"By the letter of the law", certainly if we're just talking about RFC 854, there's no mention of shells, or some of the other constraints you're projecting onto it.
"Remote user access to service hosts (i.e., remote terminal access)" is perfectly consistent with someone accessing a MUD.
When it comes to convention, though, which is influenced by pragmatic issues such as security constraints, you have more of a case.
Also most linux containers do not ships with such binaries to save on img size and reduce vuln management overhead.
$ ls --human --size --dereference $(which telnet)
144K /usr/bin/telnetThe point of reducing the amount of binaries shipped with the image is also to reduce the amount of CVEs/vulns in your reports that wouldn't be relevant for your app but woulld still be raised by their presence.
Debian also isn’t shipping telnet in the base install since Debian 11.
I mean technically MS Windows 10 is ten years old, but the big upgrade wave to 10 only happened like 4 years ago, which is quite recently. Maybe that is similar to macOS users, I don't know that.
If you don't care that it's read ("it's nothing secret"), but you do care that it's not modified, you should not use unencrypted plain text. That's why I explained that if you don't care if it's read that is not a sufficient justification to use unencrypted plain text, because then it might be modified, and you might care about that.
You then said that it "literally" is: if you don't care if it's read ("it's nothing secret") that is a sufficient justification to use unencrypted plain text.
But then you proceed to give an example where it is, indeed, ok to use unencrypted plain text, but only because you don't care if it's read ("it's nothing secret"), AND you don't care if it's modified. That is what I have been saying all along. If you were to care that the wind speed from the sensor on your roof is not faked, then you should not use unencrypted plain text.
So again: If you don't care that it's read, AND you don't care if it's modified, then, sure, use unencrypted plain text.
If you don't care that it's read ("it's nothing secret"), but you do care that it's not modified, that is not sufficient justification to use unencrypted plain text. Rather, in addition, you also have to not care if it's modified.
Let me give you an example. Air pressure varies, and airplanes use air pressure to measure altitude, so they need to set their altimeter to the correct air pressure. Now, the air pressure is not secret at all. Anyone could trivially measure it. So, one doesn't care if it's read ("it's nothing secret").
According to your faulty thinking, one could thus use unencrypted plain text to transmit it. However, someone could modify it, giving wrong numbers to the airplane, putting the airplane and the crew in danger. That is not good. No-one cares that the data is read ("it's nothing secret"), but we do care that it is not modified. Thus, do not use unencrypted plain text. Because if you don't care if it is read ("it's nothing secret"), that is not sufficient justification to use unencrypted plain text. You have to, in addition, not care if it is modified.
In your case, you don't care if it is read ("it's nothing secret"), AND you don't care if it modified. But someone else might not care if it is read, but DO care if it is modified.
Do you understand this now, or should I make a full 2x2 matrix with all possibilities and carefully explain each case with examples?