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▲ cowlevel 3 hours ago

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

And why do we want finger to exist?

▲Bender 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

Its just a private fork of an open source anonymous image board. I had a static blog for it but I got bored and moved all my blog posts to the image board. Probably a rather unorthodox experiment. The reply button is at the bottom right. I might change that.

And why do we want finger to exist?

There were discussions in the past about the finger service and how hardly anyone runs it any more and even less likely to be found on the open internet. DNS seemed like a good replacement for it to me as more and more people have domains now and authoritative DNS servers are likely to be more secure and distributed I think. Maybe one day specific groups of people do something like this in place of sites like X. half kidding

Now instead of having a special purpose client, one need only query a DNS record. In this case I use "dig" as the example but there are other DNS tools people might prefer to use.

▲GalaxyNova 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Because it allows for an easy interface to see what someone else is up to without needing to load a JS-heavy page.

▲warkdarrior 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Assuming you have this finger app installed. My Android store does not seem to have one, for example.

▲spauldo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Finger is a protocol. It's older than IP.

You can read about it in RFC 742.

▲assimpleaspossi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unix, Linux and BSD have finger built in.

▲drivers99 an hour ago | parent [-]

Just found out macOS has it too. Created a .plan file and used finger on my user name and it showed the plan. There's no fingerd or anything listening on the port though, but it worked locally. Neat.

▲Bender 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's just a shell function so in this case if one had a terminal app that has a shell one could add the function. No idea how feasible that is on a phone.

▲cowlevel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A terminal emulator is more heavy than a dedicated app is

▲Bender 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I will leave writing an app to someone else. I've watched others go through all the challenges of getting into app stores and it's just not for me.

▲cowlevel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Fortunately some phones allow you to install apps, not just get them through the overpriced shit store.

▲anthk 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

If it has a shell and telnet/nc it has finger:

echo user | nc example.com 79

Lynx works too over gopher:

lynx gopher://graph.no:79/0/london