This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in
1995; any technical information is probably outdated.
Web browser as (even more) general purpose TCP/IP client
Article: 7934 of alt.hackers Newsgroups: alt.hackers From: chmbt@zeus.bris.ac.uk (MB. Taylor) Subject: Web browser as (even more) general purpose TCP/IP client Message-ID: D9IE3u.Awo@info.bris.ac.uk Sender: usenet@info.bris.ac.uk (Usenet news owner) Nntp-Posting-Host: zeus.bris.ac.uk Reply-To: mark.taylor@bristol.ac.uk Organization: Chemistry dept, Bristol University, UK X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 19:28:41 GMT Approved: No, buzz off. Lines: 43 Status: RO
Nothing to say, apart from my
ObHack:
I was leafing through /etc/services and trying out a few TCP/IP services,
and it occurred to me that you can get some useful stuff done by just
sending *anything* to the right port of some servers, and even more
by sending not very complicated things. E.g. you can get the time
of day by telnetting to port 13 of a daytime server without any input.
Since the gopher protocol specifies sending an empty string as first
request to a gopher server, you can fool a web browser into getting the
time:
gopher://time.nist.gov:13/0
13 is the daytime port, and the 0 tells the browser it's going to get a
text document back.
But you can adapt this to do more complicated things, e.g. finger
name@host.domain by by using the URL:
gopher://host.domain:79/0name
or get a list of newsgroups from your NNTP server (multiple lines by
inserting %0d%0a in between):
gopher://news.domain:119/0list%0d%0aquit
and so on. You can even gopher to port 80 and speak HTTP to retrieve
an HTML document (I haven't tried this, but I suppose you could do it
to coax a gopher client to read documents off the WWW, though it
wouldn't pick up the hyperlinks of course).
I've put some examples at http://zeus.bris.ac.uk/~chmbt/webhack.html
If you visit, why not use the 'link' there which speaks SMTP to a
local server and sends me mail.
Not exactly essential stuff, but I thought it was neat.
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| Mark Beauchamp Taylor - physicist trapped in a chemist's body. |
| mark.taylor@bris.ac.uk http://zeus.bris.ac.uk/~chmbt/index.html |
| Department of Chemistry, University of Bristol, UK -------
-----------------------------------------------------| ... It's the future! |
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