Why?. Why why why why why....
If you're going to trust the untrusted machine anyway running a virus
run-time environment just google for putty, download and run it.
Having said that I'd never log in from crap like that. your risk of
getting nailed by a keylogger or garbage that's been installed on a
machine you don't control is probably far greater than the chances
your telnet session is actually going to get sniffed (unless you are
on wireless, at which point everyone is watching your traffic)
I.E. if a gun was held to my head force me to log in somewhere I
cared about, If my choice was to to either download putty to a windows
box (or any box) I didn't control and use ssh, or use an openbsd
machine I control and telnet in the clear, I'd pick the latter. IMO
the risk of an evesdropper on the router path is less than the risk of
running a garbage endpoint operating system, and you need only look at
the volume of worm traffic and the size of the drone armies out there
to know that.
Mind you the gun holder better shoot well - I didn't say I
liked either alternative.
My two cents? if you are running these things and need to get at them
remotely, and it's not worth enough to have a secure laptop to do it
from? just use telnet and a regular password, security is obviously
not an important enough issue for you then to be wasting time on it.
And don't tell me you can't afford a laptop - it's not like you need
a fancy one to run OpenBSD and ssh on. You can probably buy a used
laptop capable of doing that for less than what I spend on toilet
paper in a week, considering my ass is really large and I eat
lots of bran.
-Bob
