Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Re:Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated by harrall on Thursday February 12, 2026 @12:50AM (#46985289)

You can wrap any TCP protocol in TLS which means every TCP protocol supports encryption, Telnet included. The app (and server) simply need to wrap their connections in TLS, which is trivial in many programming ecosystems.

And IMO, X.509 (used in TLS) is virtually superior over SSH’s bespoke certificate format in every way. You get both regular certificate pinning (like what SSH uses now) AND full certificate authority chains (if you want).

The main downside is that X.509 is more complex.

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Re:Reports of Telnet's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated by yjftsjthsd-h on Thursday February 12, 2026 @12:57AM (#46985322)

> You get both regular certificate pinning (like what SSH uses now) AND full certificate authority chains (if you want).

It doesn't do full chains, but SSH does have certificate authorities. I agree that the lack of intermediate CAs is a limitation (a CA can only sign a leaf node public key directly), but it's still super useful.

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