I've never really understood why it's a thing to use a telnet client for transmitting text on a socket for purposes other than telnet. My understanding is that telnet is a proper protocol with escape sequences/etc, and even that HTTP/SMTP/etc require things like \r\n for line breaks. Are these protocols just... close enough that it's not a problem in practice for text data?
Because for a long time, on most computers, the telnet client was the closest thing to an "open a tcp socket to this ip/port and connect the i/o from it to stdin/stdout" application you can get without installing something or coding it up yourself.
These days we have netcat/socat and others, but they're not reliably installed, while telnet used to be generally available because telnetting to another machine was more common.
These days, the answer would be to use a netcat variant. In the past, telnet was the best we could be confident would be there.
In corporate environments, netcat was often banned as it was seen as a "hacking" tool. Having it installed would sometimes get the attention of the security folks, depending how tightly they controlled things.
The telnet protocol with escapes, etc. is only used by the telnet client if you’re connecting to the telnet port. If you’re connecting to HTTP, SMTP or something else, the telnet protocol is not enabled.
The point is not that this particular binary is huge, the point is that we tend to strip images of anything that is not useful for the actual application shipped. So we strip everything. Also: small things adds up. On AI prompt can be handled reasonably by a single machine, millions of concurrent ones involve huge datacenters and whole energy plants being restarted/built.
The point of reducing the amount of binaries shipped with the image is also to reduce the amount of CVEs/vulns in your reports that wouldn't be relevant for your app but woulld still be raised by their presence.
Thanks, sounds like a recent development. I don't use macOS, but on other peoples macOS computer it was always there, even when they are not developers. But it could very well be that these computers are ten years old.
I mean technically MS Windows 10 is ten years old, but the big upgrade wave to 10 only happened like 4 years ago, which is quite recently. Maybe that is similar to macOS users, I don't know that.
