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It makes me sad to think of all those simple little services we used to run on *NIX machines, like `finger` and `whois`. You'd never want to disclose that information now, but at the time it was quite nice to be able to see if a friend or colleague was around with a simple network query.


I remember when I could connect to nearly any server on the internet on port 25 and manually type the commands to send an email.

.


You can still submit mail to virtually any mail server using telnet. I just tried it on Gmail for curiosity, and it did work!


I dunno. Everyone fairly-publicly shares their entire friend network and what they had for lunch, now, usually under their real name.




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