Wanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO!
I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!
I think I was the only one in the operations team who knew how to use telnet to check connections and existence of adresses on company and outside email servers.
As well as other low level tools to diagnose problems with Windows PCs and servers. There just weren't any gui tools like that.
During the Summer of 1997, I stayed at my university and had a job at the computer lab in the basement of the library. We had four Windows 95 PCs, four Mac Quadras, and then tons of VT terminals. I specifically remember the one at the lab assistants desk being a VT-320. Anyway, it was enough for me to telnet to BatMUD. I got all the way up to level 32 or so (and made some friends!) before I stopped playing. Man, that was a great Summer. Well ... it was great until I got cheated on but that's a whole other story. :-p
MUDding both taught me programming and pretty well wrecked my schooling, although in fairness, I didn't take college very seriously. Never finished my degree, which I now regret.
I fixed a client’s Outlook many years ago with telnet. The app just wouldn’t download email. No error.
So, with the guy looking over my shoulder, I telnet to the email server, list his messages, and discover that there’s an email with an attachment that’s too big for Outlook to handle. Read some basic info from the message so he could confirm that deleting the message was fine - deleted the message, and Outlook worked again.
Telnet was among my debugging tools for web applications.
And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!
I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.
Back in 1991 the older students showed me how to telnet to port 25 and make my "From:" email address be anything. It was funny when the person sitting next to me received an email from satan@hell.gov
My very political grandpa definitely received a few emails from the "president", along with a few email from a "government agency" following up on the emails.
I remember showing it to people on school computers circa....2008? Which was funny because nearly everything was blocked on these machines......but CMD and telnet worked fine lol. I remembered the URL by heart because of it :D
I discovered Telnet from some schlocky book [1] my parents had bought at Barnes and Noble about "Ethical Hacking" written by a guy who was later given a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20. I'd no idea it was a protocol - I thought it was just a program that let you talk directly to services like SMTP. I found netcat and friends later and thus never really got to use telnet for its intended purpose.
I hate this server. Every single time someone talks about Telnet mentions this site for past FIFTEEN or TWENTY YEARS as something novel.
ITs not obscure, not unknown or special - it's the most known talent site on earth.
It was made AFIR to show capabilities of ffmpg ASCII/ANSI renderer.
Real gems are SDF.ORG, TWENEX.ORG, or Cray 1 supercomputer Access, bbses and backdoors.
Ps. Telnet can be run and it is DAILY inside of the telecoms and one of few ways to speak with BSC, RNC, RRUS and individual basebands(even ultra fresh with 5G). All over IP/SEC and isolated networks. You MUST know if you are serious about computer business hehe
AUDIT people also loves it - you can record entire session of Chinese or Swedish engineer doing some new shit to basebands. This or logging entire screen
It was a jewel of the Internet, yes the one telnet site everyone knew (the ONE and ONLY) and I'm genuinely sad to learn it's gone--it was still there last time I tried it.
And it definitely wasn't using ffmpeg, it was bespoke hand-typed ASCII
My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...
People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
It still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it).
It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)
Ah, so this is why I suddenly got a bunch of email.
Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site.
Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
traceroute:
...
15 213.136.2.6 35.049 ms 34.440 ms 34.338 ms
16 213.136.2.20 34.814 ms 33.359 ms 35.116 ms
17 213.154.229.42 33.837 ms 33.572 ms 34.794 ms
18 213.136.8.188 30.174 ms 28.810 ms 33.674 ms
tcptraceroute ... 23 :
...
15 213.136.2.6 28.626 ms 28.657 ms 28.849 ms
16 213.136.2.20 28.608 ms 28.483 ms 28.515 ms
17 213.154.229.42 27.989 ms 28.058 ms 29.336 ms
18 * * *
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.
It supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days.
That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.
That's a very fair point, but on my system telnet is 211144 bytes. How big is a javascript runtime + browser + browser sandbox. I have no idea, but I'd be really surprised if it was less than 3 orders of magnitude bigger, and not at all surprised if it was 4 orders of magnitude bigger. There's just more places for things to go wrong.
And, telnet isn't installed by default on many systems. So...YMMV.
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
This makes me think of the historical hxxp://simtel.net/ domain (now web spam, whence the hxxp), see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.... The first time seeing it I was always thinking to something like "simulated telnet"...
Tell me where the slop is distrubuted on? Its 99% Social media, fake news sites, propaganda like fox or any russian "news site" or some combo of the above.
If we dont have any of the above the propaganda or AI slop is just not worth it.
This is why having small focused MODERATED communities is the only viable future.
Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.
i bet this is something an ai could help with. "write a simple telnet client in python. It only needs to connect to the host and display what the host sends. conform to any connection initialization requirements per rfc 854". That would probably get you close.
/edit front page of google did this and it worked for me. Need to do a pip install telnetlib3
import telnetlib3
import sys
def simple_telnet_client(host, port=23):
"""
Connects to a telnet server and prints incoming data.
Compliant with RFC 854 (via telnetlib handling of NVTs).
"""
try:
# Initialize connection
print(f"Connecting to {host}:{port}...")
tn = telnetlib3.Telnet(host, port)
# Read and display output indefinitely until connection closes
while True:
# read_eager() reads data already available without blocking
data = tn.read_eager()
if data:
sys.stdout.write(data.decode('ascii', errors='ignore'))
sys.stdout.flush()
# Check if socket is closed
if tn.get_socket() is None:
break
except ConnectionRefusedError:
print("Connection refused.")
except Exception as e:
print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
finally:
if 'tn' in locals():
tn.close()
print("\nConnection closed.")
if __name__ == "__main__":
# Example usage:
# simple_telnet_client("telehack.com", 23)
# Replace with desired host
host = input("Enter host: ")
simple_telnet_client(host)
This is expected. Telnet is not encrypted and people are discouraged from using the client or the inetd daemon. It is assumed that if someone installs it manually it is more likely they have a reason to do so and hopefully understand the risks. It will always exist in repositories as there are still a myriad of enterprise appliances that use telnet for management and likely will be the case for the foreseeable future.
The Star Wars ASCII animation was how I learned telnet existed. Felt like discovering a secret passage in the internet.
There's something pure about text-based interfaces. No loading spinners, no JavaScript frameworks, no cookie banners. Just text.
Wanting to know how email worked and then stumbling on it being mentioned next to the relevant RFCs was my first exposure! You could easily check pop3 mail over telnet, by sending all the commands by hand. HELO!
I then made my first email client, then an RFC later, and after browsing the web through telnet for a while, made my first web server!
I think I was the only one in the operations team who knew how to use telnet to check connections and existence of adresses on company and outside email servers. As well as other low level tools to diagnose problems with Windows PCs and servers. There just weren't any gui tools like that.
I have checked right now that Multi-User Dungeons we played in the 90s, still exist and are played. 35 years later!
Telnet or Mudnet client needed :)
I’ve just poked my schoolmate - he almost didn’t graduate because of MUD.
During the Summer of 1997, I stayed at my university and had a job at the computer lab in the basement of the library. We had four Windows 95 PCs, four Mac Quadras, and then tons of VT terminals. I specifically remember the one at the lab assistants desk being a VT-320. Anyway, it was enough for me to telnet to BatMUD. I got all the way up to level 32 or so (and made some friends!) before I stopped playing. Man, that was a great Summer. Well ... it was great until I got cheated on but that's a whole other story. :-p
MUDding both taught me programming and pretty well wrecked my schooling, although in fairness, I didn't take college very seriously. Never finished my degree, which I now regret.
But you know TCL :)
Why do you regret it? People 40+ and juniors can't get jobs now anyways. Even with proper degrees.
These were lpmuds, so I know object-oriented C.
I know things are brutal out there, but if I find myself unemployed, I’ll need every possible edge I can find. Homelessness is decidedly suboptimal.
I fixed a client’s Outlook many years ago with telnet. The app just wouldn’t download email. No error.
So, with the guy looking over my shoulder, I telnet to the email server, list his messages, and discover that there’s an email with an attachment that’s too big for Outlook to handle. Read some basic info from the message so he could confirm that deleting the message was fine - deleted the message, and Outlook worked again.
Dude was thrilled. Fun times.
Telnet was among my debugging tools for web applications.
And sending an email without line editing felt much more exciting than a dedicated mail client. Just dig the remote MX, telnet to port 25 and do it by hand. Marvelous!
I vaguely remember using telnet to debug nodes from behind load balancers. I would ssh to the load balancer ( just a freebsd box with Apache ). Then telnet from there to port 80 on one of the app servers and issue get requests (including headers) by hand to see what the loadbalancer was seeing in the responses. Very tedious, I can't remember why but i do remember a BOF literally standing behind me and forcing me to do this with telnet and not something like curl/wget.
EHLO! You're definitely not alone on this RFC path ;-)
sending email over telnet was part of my training as tech support for a dial-up ISP.
Back in 1991 the older students showed me how to telnet to port 25 and make my "From:" email address be anything. It was funny when the person sitting next to me received an email from satan@hell.gov
My very political grandpa definitely received a few emails from the "president", along with a few email from a "government agency" following up on the emails.
Hey. That was a gateway drug for teenage 'hackers' hehe
I remember grex.org and arbornet.org . My first free Unix shel acccounts hehe. Made friends worldwide.
Grex only shut down recently, in 2023.
I hate to be that guy, but HELO/EHLO is smtp, not pop3
I stand corrected! In my defense, it's definitely been a long while. ;)
I remember showing it to people on school computers circa....2008? Which was funny because nearly everything was blocked on these machines......but CMD and telnet worked fine lol. I remembered the URL by heart because of it :D
I discovered Telnet from some schlocky book [1] my parents had bought at Barnes and Noble about "Ethical Hacking" written by a guy who was later given a "Security Charlatan of the Year" award at DEF CON 20. I'd no idea it was a protocol - I thought it was just a program that let you talk directly to services like SMTP. I found netcat and friends later and thus never really got to use telnet for its intended purpose.
[1] https://archive.org/details/unofficialguidet0000fadi_r0y3/pa...
We run a copy using https://github.com/gabe565/ascii-movie, you can `nc starwars.s2.dev 23`
It's our favorite way of demoing s2.dev, https://x.com/jrdi/status/2014318511120670859
The tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
Not many moving pictures either. It was like the literary age of the internet.
Whenever I want to go back to this era, I fire up w3m. Not everything works but things work well enough to quench my thirst
For real! I just unlocked my memory of the Star Wars asciimation. Totally forgot it existed until now.
I hate this server. Every single time someone talks about Telnet mentions this site for past FIFTEEN or TWENTY YEARS as something novel.
ITs not obscure, not unknown or special - it's the most known talent site on earth.
It was made AFIR to show capabilities of ffmpg ASCII/ANSI renderer.
Real gems are SDF.ORG, TWENEX.ORG, or Cray 1 supercomputer Access, bbses and backdoors.
Ps. Telnet can be run and it is DAILY inside of the telecoms and one of few ways to speak with BSC, RNC, RRUS and individual basebands(even ultra fresh with 5G). All over IP/SEC and isolated networks. You MUST know if you are serious about computer business hehe
AUDIT people also loves it - you can record entire session of Chinese or Swedish engineer doing some new shit to basebands. This or logging entire screen
Don't think it's dead.
It was a jewel of the Internet, yes the one telnet site everyone knew (the ONE and ONLY) and I'm genuinely sad to learn it's gone--it was still there last time I tried it.
And it definitely wasn't using ffmpeg, it was bespoke hand-typed ASCII
apt-get install telnet (or whatever the package is called).
Then:
telnet SDF.org
get freeish forever Unix shell account.
My favourite way back in the day (late 90s/early 00s or so) was telling people to go start->run->telnet www.boston.ru and it would be a little asciimation of a penis getting erect and then spurting with a pc speaker noise...
People would sometimes flip out like they had gotten a virus or whatever
How was a noise other than ASCII BEL sent over telnet?
Others: (where netcat is suggested) https://github.com/chubin/awesome-console-services?tab=readm...
I was wondering why the Starwars one is not at the top of the list. Then I saw it no longer exists :-(
It still exists, and still works. I was sure I showed it to someone a few months ago, and just confirmed, it's still online. (I know the guy who built it). It works over ipv4 and v6, with the ipv6 version having some additions ;)
Thanks! Admittedly I didn't check before writing my comment. It does indeed still work! Maybe one has to enable ipv6.
It worked last time i tried it, but it's not working for me today
Doesn't work for me
Ah, so this is why I suddenly got a bunch of email.
Hey all, site owner here. Thanks for the visits and all the fun stories! I really miss this era of computing. Feel free to let me know if you have something that should be added to the site.
Here's some site meta-history too:
https://telnet.org/history/
Cool site! I especially like the list of RFCs.
Just fyi, towel.blinkenlights.nl:23 still works for me, though I think maybe that's an IPv6 version, there's a note about ipv6 at the start that I was too slow to read. Maybe it should be re-listed? :)
Thanks! I did notice there are mixed stories about it working, and I got some email about it too. I'll check it out and make an update.
it's possible one of those emails might have been from me ;)
Very cool, some nice nostalgia looking through that list!
Missed a trick not being able to “telnet telnet.org” though. :-)
try .com
That doesn't work either? Looks like the .com and .net domains are sadly just up for sale rather than being used for something fun.
"I Ping, Therefore I Am": https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/
Wow, that scrolling banner...
Wow, that takes me back. It reminds me of the pre-web days when people would set up telnet services for providing information about the weather, ham radio callsigns, lyrics, FTP search engine (archie), and of course BBSs. An acquaintance of mine maintained a list of telnet BBSs and services that was fairly popular at the time. [1]
[1] http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/internetinfo.txt
Oh man RIP towel.blinkenlights.nl 23
Anyone knows what happened with it? Maybe the creator would like to pass the torch?
Its still running just fine
Connecting to it times out for me.
Ah, it must be ipv6 only now then:
t14 (2a0e:5700:xxxx) -> towel.blinkenl2026-01-27T13:33:52+0100 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 2a0e:5700:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 0.8 0.9 0.8 1.2 0.2 2. 2a02:f640:xxxxxx 0.0% 4 8.5 9.3 8.4 11.0 1.2 3. 2a02:f640::1 0.0% 4 8.2 8.8 8.2 9.2 0.5 4. amsix-501.xe-0-0-0.jun1.bit-1.ne 0.0% 4 12.9 13.1 11.7 15.3 1.6 5. e48.leaf-sw2.bit-1.network.bit.n 0.0% 4 10.7 11.2 10.7 11.8 0.5 6. lo0.leaf-sw3.bit-2b.network.bit. 0.0% 4 11.8 12.0 11.8 12.3 0.3 7. 2001:7b8::213:136:2:43 0.0% 4 12.8 12.0 11.2 12.8 0.7 8. deepthought.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 4 12.4 11.8 11.4 12.4 0.4 9. towel.blinkenlights.nl 0.0% 3 11.6 11.8 11.5 12.2 0.4 ```alternative: telehack.com
This is wonderful. Thank you.
If you run stuff like ZeroTier or Tailscale or any other encrypted mesh or VPN you can just run telnetd and happily remote access with plain text.
Not that it buys you anything other than being retro. :)
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/underground/hacking/INTERN...
Too bad mobile killed the dialtone.
nethack.alt.org is conspicuously absent...
It supports SSH. Since that's already in place, not much point in telnet, especially since NAO wants a password. And you prettu much have to go out of your way to install a telnet client these days.
That's a bit like connecting to IRC with netcat. It's easy to do, there's some kind of a retro hacker feel to it, but it's just not very practical.
And Slashem (his expanded sibling) and the server for Dungeon Crawl (for people which prefer action over exploration).
> Rainmaker was pretty great, and it lasted at least as far as 2018. I don’t recall what happened to it.
WeatherUnderground shut its API down in 2018.
Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website. ANSI escape sequences can seriously mess with your system, RCE included.
Note that this is much more dangerous than visiting a website.
Are you being hyperbolic or do you seriously think the attack surface area of ANSI escape sequences is 'much more' than, say, Javascrpt?
JavaScript has to escape the browser sandbox, does telnet have a similar sandbox? Or can it access the system directly?
I don't know the answer but if telnet can directly access the system that seems more dangerous irrespective of the attack surface.
Telnet is "sandboxed" in that it can only output characters to your tty, however that in itself is quite a powerful primitive.
The ANSI control characters wield power of a huge stack of not very robust code
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-56803
That's a very fair point, but on my system telnet is 211144 bytes. How big is a javascript runtime + browser + browser sandbox. I have no idea, but I'd be really surprised if it was less than 3 orders of magnitude bigger, and not at all surprised if it was 4 orders of magnitude bigger. There's just more places for things to go wrong.
And, telnet isn't installed by default on many systems. So...YMMV.
My first introduction to the internet was through the telnet-based EW-too talkers like Foothills (Boston U) and Forest (UTS). I have very fond memories of staying up late talking to people from all over the globe. It was truly amazing to me.
The best part was how the users moderated behaviour - bad actors were ejected swiftly but rarely permanently.
The first BBS I used in the 80's eventually ended up with a telnet daemon but its owner passed away and I think the person that took it over eventually shut lois.org down. Domain is still registered. I can't fault them, it was an ancient system.
$> telnet tsunami.thebigwave.net
The one and only. Still online to my surprise.
for years I had this in my .muttrc. it's been commented out since it stopped working...
#set signature="cat ~/.signature && telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl 666 | tail -n3|"
Per this thread it may be IPv6 only now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775926
For telnet.wiki.gd, there is a captcha:
Captcha: Repeat the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times.
All my answers failed. I guess I must be a computer.
Tried:
- Venera
- Venera 7
- the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times.
- the first spacecraft to land on another planet three times
- the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet
- Rosetta
...
Okay found it: Venera Venera Venera
> - the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet the first spacecraft to land on another planet
The Wi-Fi password is "four words all uppercase, one word all lowercase".
venera venera venera
This is insane
> doom.w-graj.net 666
> Play Doom in the terminal (code and details)
For those of you curious about what the Star Wars one looked like, the tradition lives on here: ssh -p 1977 sw.taigrr.com
just type `starwars` from telehack
towel.blinkenlights.nl seems to still work for me?
Thank you! This was fun.
I did Pong, Breakout and Tetris few years ago: telnet milek7.pl
I made a roguelike telnet server telnet hetz.latha.org 2323
Wasted opportunity for a telnet.net or tel.net domain.
If you want a rabbit hole, this is the likely owner of both tel.net and sms.net = https://www.gbnet.net/
This makes me think of the historical hxxp://simtel.net/ domain (now web spam, whence the hxxp), see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20010602231157/http://www.simtel.... The first time seeing it I was always thinking to something like "simulated telnet"...
Also teln.et (Ethiopia)
Any one got a good MUD to recommend?
BatMUD is the one I played a long time ago, and has been around for 35 years now. I honestly don't know how active it is these days.
https://www.bat.org
I just checked and ancient.anguish.org is still online. Port 2222.
I can forsee a future when all the AI slop, popups, fake news, propaganda and ads have fully consumed the web.
Maybe then we just go back to an oldschool text based way of communicating.
No google. No socials. Just text.
We'll all just be fingering each other.
Can’t tell if this is a sexual comment or a comment on people tattling on each other but thought provoking either way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
That should be Gopher for websites but advertisers would find it should it become popular. Text chat via IRCD. Advertisers get banned on IRC.
Or its modern incarnation, Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Do you believe that it is impossible to advertise, spread fake news or propaganda via text?
Do you know what the letters in LLM mean?
Tell me where the slop is distrubuted on? Its 99% Social media, fake news sites, propaganda like fox or any russian "news site" or some combo of the above.
If we dont have any of the above the propaganda or AI slop is just not worth it.
This is why having small focused MODERATED communities is the only viable future.
telnet to port 25 to send fake emails <- glory days.
this is ssh, but funky.nondterministic.computer is one
ssh doesn't support virtual hosts, otherwise I'd try some other stuff. There's just something to be said for running on the default port.
uff I hope i can list my MUD game (still in dev, though)
Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.
SillyMUD branches will always have a special place in my heart. Who doesn’t love leveling up in Sesame Street?!
Surfers!
try pub400.com
Related to the last Telnet CVE? Why talking about telnet now otherwise?
haha, I was just going to say the same thing
i bet this is something an ai could help with. "write a simple telnet client in python. It only needs to connect to the host and display what the host sends. conform to any connection initialization requirements per rfc 854". That would probably get you close.
/edit front page of google did this and it worked for me. Need to do a pip install telnetlib3
apt/brew/your-package-manager install telnet is simpler and more reliable.
Search your OS repositories for something like inetutils-telnet.
I know. It's just that out-of-the-box, telnet isn't even installed anymore.
telnet isn't even installed anymore.
This is expected. Telnet is not encrypted and people are discouraged from using the client or the inetd daemon. It is assumed that if someone installs it manually it is more likely they have a reason to do so and hopefully understand the risks. It will always exist in repositories as there are still a myriad of enterprise appliances that use telnet for management and likely will be the case for the foreseeable future.
netcat is though
May be a case of PEBKAC.