Hams use it over packet radio sometimes since encryption is forbidden on the amateur bands.

IMHO we need a good telnet replacement that sends signed data. Most people interpret signatures as allowed under FCC rules, just not encryption.

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mananaysiempre 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.)

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iamnothere 19 hours ago | parent [-]

TIL that IPsec can be used without encryption. That should work pretty well.

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.

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mananaysiempre 17 hours ago | parent [-]

What I meant in my remark about Telnet is that, if you just want is a bidirectional byte pipe to e.g. run a terminal over, then you just need TCP or anything else providing the same abstraction, like TLS-over-TCP or TCP-over-IPsec; whether you then choose to run a getty on that terminal is not for the network to care. (I don’t believe you can get netcat to drive a PTY, so you’ll need e.g. socat. And of course if you want cryptographic authentication then you don’t need or want a getty.)

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.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6270

	▲	iamnothere 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not so much what I need as what is in common use. Many BBS/terminal stacks for hams haven’t been updated in what seems like decades, except for security updates. It’s tough to get the old guard interested in changing, so they continue to offer their services via Telnet. I’m not sure if what they provide uses any advanced features or not.

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lambdaone 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can use ssh with the None cipher, thus disabling encryption entirely while still using the rest of the protocol.

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ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most people don't care about FCC rules.

I'm breaking a tonne of FCC rules right now.

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trebligdivad 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes but in many ways it's riskier to do that when you have a license from them.

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mystraline 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In general, this is pretty true in practice.

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.

	▲	ErroneousBosh 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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?