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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

Finger was the original Twitter. We used to get updates on Quake's development from John Carmack by fingering his email. He used to write elaborate ".plan" files too, no nonsense character limits were in sight yet. It was magical. It worked like this:

  $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com

No retweets, no likes, no notifications, no HN frontpage, but John Carmack kept writing them, and we kept reading. Even without any amplification dynamics, it was still engaging.

I've tried the same now, 30 years after my last finger. It wasn't even installed on Ubuntu by default. I had to install it, and expectedly:

  $ finger johnc@idsoftware.com
  finger: connect: Connection timed out

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Finger still exists at sdf.org

A couple on shodan [1a][1b] Maybe we should make finger great again, but with TLS. fingers? Looks like there is a draft [2]

[1a] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=finger+%2Bport+79

[1b] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=finger

[2] - https://github.com/noveltylanterns/fingers

Oh pretty please, if we revive this protocol, can we please pick a better name? Like, any name? Literally anything else, that doesn’t evoke weirdly sexual imagery?

Like fist?! Oh wait…

Glove would work

Like the protection metaphor there, glove would be great for TLS finger!

Fingercot.

A glove is for the whole hand though. How about thimble?

Well I thought about it and if it's a body part there will be someone into that. Then I thought maybe poke, nope some are into that too. I guess maybe "status" port? Kindof like having an away message. It could be a fixed buffer as to not overlflow. Of course that could be accomplished in DNS using TXT.

Honestly I am too lazy to make an RFC. Maybe if enough people make a finger.domain.tld text record it would catch on. [1]

    dig +short -t txt finger.nochan.net
    "status: currently spending time on hacker news."

or replace the finger binary with a shell function: [2]

[1] - https://www.whatsmydns.net/#TXT/finger.nochan.net

[2] - https://blawg.nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260527-DNS-A-Repl...

Your point is valid, but how do you feel telling your wife today I fingered Alice, and guess what she was up to?

Well that depends on the marriage. She might want to smell what Alice is up to.

Wait until you hear about USB condoms.

In my electronics class in high school we learned to strip and do joints.

We also learned the resister color codes via mnemonics.

"Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly, Get Some Now" Curious if they still teach that one. [1] Wikipedia says it is outdated / offensive but it was back then too.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electronic_color_code_...

Black Boys, since the first mnemonic letter is for the color black. And we didn't have Get Some Now, that feels redundant since everyone knows gold is better than silver.

radar? Since it's an active request response protocol.

the weird sexual imagery makes it fun and memorable

You can do this with ATProto / Bluesky! You can self-host your own PDS (or use Bluesky) and clients are super simple. I just had Google Search AI Mode vibe code as a 60 line shell script.

    $ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/snth/radar/refs/heads/main/radar
    $ chmod +x radar
    $ ./radar snth@bsky.social
    [RADAR] Scanning for snth.bsky.social...
    
    [RADAR SCREEN]
    User:        Tobias Brandt (@snth.bsky.social)
    Status:      Active
    Last Seen:   2026-05-28T19:42:15.865Z
    --------------------------------------------------
    Just vibe coded a 60 line POSIX script Bluesky client in the style of  `finger` of old:
    
    github.com/snth/radar
    --------------------------------------------------

If you wanted to be more authentic to the original you could implement a custom Lexicon.

Any gopher client can do finger too:

      finger london@graph.no
 
     lynx gopher://graph.no:79/0/London

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