On: Show HN: A library to add a command promp (and telnet) to your programs

[p4bl0]

The first thing I thought of is "I could use this to telnet into long running computation processes and force them to flush those buffers to see where they're at and how it goes". This use case alone make this kind of thing worthy :).

[dspillett → p4bl0]

Some tools respond to a Unix signal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(IPC)) this way, usually SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2 though I've seen SIGCONT used too. SIGINT also, though that feels wrong to me as it circumvents the commonly expected response to ctrl-c.

[p4bl0 → dspillett]

Yes that's actually what I did for my last long running jobs: I trapped SIGUSR1 so that when my process receives it it flushes its buffers.

[onion2k → p4bl0]

If you do it with telnet then so could I.. :)

[p4bl0 → onion2k]

Not really if the socket is bound to localhost and the process runs on my machine :).

[jacobush → p4bl0]

... But eBay could.

[nsteel → jacobush]

How? Ebay could send HTTP requests to the local server but what would that achieve?

[jacobush → nsteel]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436775

[nsteel → jacobush]

Unless I am missing something, a port scan is not a telnet connection. I still don't see how eBay (or anyone) has access through the browser.