Maybe the answer is to define a plan base URL as a DNS TXT resource on a particular DNS domain. For instance, I added the string `< plan https://bi6.us/PL/ >` as a TXT resource at _plan.hamrick.rocks. It should now be a trivial task to write a program called `finger-ng` that when I type `finger-ng meadhbh@hamrick.rocks`, it queries the TXT record at `_plan.hamrick.rocks`, extracts the plan base URL and then retrieves and displays a text document found at `https://bi6.us/PL/meadhbh%40hamrick.rocks`. I guess you could serve up a text/plain, text/html or even image/avif if you wanted to.
This, of course, assumes `bi6.us` is set up to allow me to update that file, but this is also straight-forward. Anyway, check back in a couple days and I'll have some code and I'll write the RFC/ID next week.
There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system.
As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!"
Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator.
I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.
The start page exists because finger has no discovery layer. finger @host lists users. lookit makes that list selectable, so you can wander a server instead of querying one address at a time.
I just released a v0.2 beta, feedback welcome: https://github.com/jonathandeamer/lookit/releases/tag/v0.2.0...
Perhaps a global database or a parallel project like a search engine focused on fingering is needed. The sources are scattered, and clients like yours would greatly benefit from that.
I'd also like to mention that if you have Emacs, I also have my own client: https://git.andros.dev/andros/efinger.el
Was definitely an inspiration for lookit. And yes, a search engine would be cool!
Also... I seem to remember more than one security issue with stock `fingerd` at the time. After the second or third flaw in fingerd, I think it was banned (as much as it could be) from machines at Convex. By the time I made it to IBM/AIX, it was a serious no-no to have running on your machines.
https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/tree/mast...
(1) Looks like great reading. (2) Who compiled the archive, and how? This feels like one of those situations where a person records the evening news onto VHS for decades; except here they were running finger every day for decades? (3) Is there a more mobile-friendly way to browse it?
Come to think of it I setup my first “date” (more like a hookup) over unix talk.
We had a legit proto social network going, all over telnet!
What I find funny is how an Estonian proverb/saying would fit here quite nicely: “don’t try to teach your grandfather how to have sex.” In this case, the grandfather didn’t need teaching - it was molded by the era into what was necessary.
AI smell?
The slop-machines write the way they do because they have been fed material, and they then spew that back out. So any writer whose style looks a little different, eccentric, or unique may find that the slop-machine's stochastic processes lead them into a state where the pool of possible continuations is small enough that the mimicry is strong.
My wife's writings have recently been labelled as "probably AI" ... and we are livid.
But there's nothing we can do except write in a style that is not truly our own, just to avoid the inaccurate "slop identification" algorithms from smearing us.
Vile machines.
/rant
Just one cell.
Heck, you could probably make a little program for HN to use the about box as the service and achieve the same thing.
My GF when I was first learning these names was convinced the Unix principals did all this quite deliberately and "finger" was her headliner argument. Evidently, even in 1971 someone complained: https://blog.robertelder.org/intro-to-pinky-command/ (relevant to that source, Usenet/Net News/mailing lists may be another social network which never exactly died and even today LKML, zsh-workers, etc. are main communication avenues).