An RCE in GNU's telnetd has no relationship to the sunsetting of telnet. Something could equally likely happen with SSH (but not really because the OpenBSD folks are paranoid by nature).
Apple removing the telnet client from OS X was a stupid move. How can you call yourself UNIX and not have a telnet client? It's like removing grep or ed.
Thats what the mystery exceptions for the Open Group macOS UNIX certification was for!
telnet has never been in POSIX though.
It's a joke and a poke that macOS isn't certified UNIX as shipped.
https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/
To actually pass the certification test suite on a real system, Apple sometimes needs to apply special configurations (e.g., disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP), using case-sensitive filesystem, enabling certain legacy services, etc.).
telnet(1) is not required by POSIX (nor is nc or ssh required!)
Ironically, telnet(1) did not begin as a "Unix" utility but an ARPANET protocol suite program. It was available cross-platform. It is unclear whether all editions of Unix included a client, but BSD for sure was the point where telnet and TCP/IP became essential integrations for the systems.
There's always nc hostname 23 unless you need authentication
There's no UNIX requirement for telnet.
Ubuntu does not include it by default (starting 16.04?). Most most distros don't.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Apple still includes uucp for some unknown reason.
The saving disk space argument makes no sense because telnet was one of the smaller binaries in /usr/bin.
Telnet continues to be widely used for select use cases and being told we're naughty by not including it feels punitive and just adds extra steps. What are you supposed to do, trash a $1m piece of industrial equipment because Apple wants to remind you Telnet is insecure?
New devices are still being released with Telnet where SSH is impractical or unnecessary.
There are many things I want to say in reply to this. So I’ll bullet point them:
* yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
* there are a million telnet clients out in the world. And ones far better than the default OS one. Apple not shipping one standard is not the end of the world or really anything more than a mild inconvenience for the small handful of people who need actual “Telnet” as opposed to Netcat or socat, both of which are far better than base Telnet.
> yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
No, you already own this capital equipment. It's the laptops running macOS that are ephemeral and disposable.
I don't care for excuses or workarounds; why did they do it?
It was an explicit decision whilst leaving a lot more—arguably more useless—garbage in.
Every OS that removed telnet did so for a symbolic reason, not because it was helpful technically.
It seems rather typical for Apple. The removal of the headphone jack obsoleted thousands of consumer devices.
Ubuntu and derivates removing telnet from the default install, along with other basic tools like traceroute etc, was one of the driving factors toward me creating my own distro. I'm sick of basic stuff being omitted because somebody just decided it's not needed anymore.
How on god’s green earth is `sudo apt install telnet` sufficiently challenging to be a driving factor to creating your own distro??