Telnet Versus SSH

Although Telnet is worth keeping around as a fail-safe, last-resort option, SSH is superior in nearly every way. Telnet is fast but also unsecure. As stated earlier, it sends all your text, including your password, in plain text that can be read by anyone with the right tools. SSH, on the other hand, encrypts all your communication and so is more resource intensive but secure—even a government security agency sniffing your packets for some reason would still have a hard time cracking the encryption.

Andy Green, posting to the fedora-list mailing list, summed up the Telnet situation perfectly when he said, “As Telnet is universally acknowledged to encourage evil, the service telnetd is not enabled by default.” It is worthwhile ...

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