EggBusters - Decoding the Telnet Star Wars

Welcome to EggBusters! This is a new series aimed at uncovering things that people think are Easter Eggs, but they are not. This time, we will be having a look at the 'Star Wars Telnet'.

What is it, anyway?

In this, make sure that you have Telnet enabled in your PC (I am using a Windows Machine, but it works on Mac as well), and open Command Line by pressing Win + R and then typing 'cmd'.

Once the Command Line has opened, type 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl' and if the connection is successful, then you can see Star Wars in ASCII Art form. This can also be accessed using Mac, and it is sometimes called a 'Windows Telnet Easter Egg' or 'Mac Telnet Easter Egg', among other names.

What is Telnet?

Telnet can be thought of as an ancient version of Remote Desktop application. It was initially a breakthrough but it was soon discovered that since Telnet does not encrypt the packets that it sends over the internet hub, router or other access points, and thus, anyone can eavesdrop on the packets that are sent during the connection. This caused the technology to be abandoned. But, it is still supported in Windows 10 (otherwise known as Windows NT 10.0), and other Operating Systems. This is how Wikipedia describes it - 

"Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area netwokr to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control information in an 8-bit byte oriented data connection over Transmission Control Protocol." [Link  - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet]

What happens when we use Telnet to connect to 'towel.blinkenlights.nl'? What is it?

'towel.blinkenlights.nl' is an external server. When we use the Telnet service to connect to this server, the server send some commands back to the machine that is accessing it. The commands manifest themselves as ASCII Art that we perceive as pictures. A sequence of these pictures gives us the movie. 

Why is it not an Easter Egg?

There is no evidence that the server 'towel.blinkenlights.nl' is hosted by Microsoft or Apple or any other company for that matter. The server only uses your machine terminal to display the ASCII art, but the art itself is generated on the server. This, in fact, can be accessed from any device that can access Telnet.

Conclusion?

We, at the HuntingEasterEggs, have decided that it is time that we tag this Egg as - 

That concludes the first of the 'EggBusters' post. You can leave a comment on the topic you think we should investigate next, among other suggestions, if any.

Happy Hunting!

EasterEggHunter