

Ask HN: Whatever happened to finger? - JBerlinsky

Recently, one of my clients asked me to program up a way to determine if a user exists on a server (in an e-mail sense) without sending them an e-mail (it's not a spammer, I promise! I get enough Viagra ads, don't really want to contribute to that.) Like a good little programmer, my mind raced to what was available: Finger and SMTP.<p>Now, I haven't had to do anything like this in years. Back when I last used finger, some e-mail hosts still implemented it. Now, it turns out that not a single one of the servers I tested support it.<p>So, HN, I ask you: whatever happened to finger?
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brk
Finger, EXPN, VRFY and such have all pretty much been killed off by SPAM and
unwanted marketing.

Most users wouldn't want the ability for an unknown 3rd party to try to guess
at, or verify, their contact info.

~~~
xenoterracide
and the non spamish reasons for wanting to verify an account on a server. e.g.
security risk.

------
wmf
Finger was obsoleted by Web 2.0 where users no longer have unix accounts.

To verify an email address, can't you do an SMTP RCPT TO and then cancel?
AFAIK some systems use this to verify that sending addresses on incoming mail
are legitimate.

~~~
fizz972
You can actually finger twitter/stautsnet users using any.io

    
    
      finger username@twitter@any.io
      finger username@identi.ca@any.io

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daemianmack
To me, finger seemed to lapse the same way the old-school tilde-based
'personal website' gave way to Geocities et al -- people gradually shifted
away from it.

Remember John Carmack of id Software using a plan file to distribute Doom
news?

That was, to my own recollection, the last gasp of finger; everyone else I
knew of had stopped using it years before he did.

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briandoll
Eric Mill gave a great talk at Ignite RailsConf in Baltimore this year on
webfinger.

While not supported everywhere yet, webfinger seems like a really great way to
handle machine-readable profile and account information identified by email
address.

Here's a link to his blog post that includes his slides and a video of his
Ignite presentation: [http://mill-industries.com/post/375-journey-of-self-
discover...](http://mill-industries.com/post/375-journey-of-self-discovery)

~~~
ecaron
Other good links for learning about webfinger are
<http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/> and
[http://www.abstractioneer.org/2009/04/personal-web-
discovery...](http://www.abstractioneer.org/2009/04/personal-web-
discovery.html).

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makecheck
I would think it has something to do with the rise of LDAP, which can
authenticate users and return pretty much any piece of information that's on
the server(s).

