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Comment by 2ton_jeff | Hacker News Reader

While linux x86_64 only, this is precisely why I built sshtalk -- https://2ton.com.au/sshtalk, or just ssh 2ton.com.au to see for yourself, I leave it open as a public/free service

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I had very low expectations of this until I ssh'd into 2ton.com.au. Wow, this is fantastic. It really brings my mind back into the BBS days.

Admittedly, I am no webguy, haha, my skills lie in old-school things... apologies if the web front doesn't do it justice

SSH2 specs are pretty clear about authentication methods. We (meaning me, the service provider) can accept or deny, negotiate any number of methods. With sshtalk, since all of the comms happen post-Perfect-Forward-Secrecy DH group exchange, I figure there is zero benefit for an anonymous chat service to remand any form of auth whatsoever, and sshtalk as I built it embodies that perfectly. It is not meant to authenticate YOU, it is meant to do the opposite of that, the only reason you know it is me you are talking to is because of domain inference and that I am @Sysop per the code itself. :-) all of these things I thought were good things.

How does your SSHD setup work? Seeing that you allow passwordsless and keyless login.

Weird, I meant to do my last post in reply to this, sorry it isn't inline correctly.

Thanks - I now see that you implemented the ssh server functionality yourself. I am now busy reading the source code for HeavyThing including the code relating to SSH.

Hey to "r3xin" and others like him who have tried to get "out" of my sshtalk, :q and exit, :eq, etc don't work. Ctrl-C will boot you straight out always, and any key during the intro "old-school demo TUI stuff I did" automatically cancels it. If you're going to type anything to me, kindly have the courtesy to say g'day :-)

Thanks, this is great! Any hope that it will eventually support split-screen for personal chats, as ytalk does?

I opted out of split-screen in favour of inline with formatting and different colours... I always found it difficult to follow the split screen chats way back then ... that and it makes multi-person windows more difficult with smaller terminal sizes :-)

Makes sense!

My dad and I have been using it for our instant messaging. We were curious how possible it would be to have timestamps on messages. I suppose we could reprogram the ASM, but x86 ASM is a little inaccessible :)

I really didn't expect for it to carry any social features or aspects, in fact the reason I built it was so that it was a ephemeral as I knew how to make it. Timestamps contravene this goal a bit... but if you are genuinely interested re: same, the mods to sshtalk would be quite trivial to add. Despite it being assembler, it is very easy.

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