[vbezhenar]

You can't do that with HTTP/2 (but thankfully every server still talks HTTP/1).

You also can't do that with TLS (and a lot of servers won't talk HTTP other than redirects). openssl s_client instead of telnet might allow you to tunnel text inside TLS, but that feels like a cheating.

And many other modern protocols, sadly, prefer binary encoding, which makes it impossible to tinker with it on wire level, not without specialized tools anyway.

I think people in the future will bother. I tried to make a fire with sticks once, I tried to burn a clay brick, these old things can be a lot of fun and sometimes of real use. If anything, AI actually makes tinkering a lot more easier. You don't need to dig into RFC to check your mail, you can just talk to LLM about it and it'll help you with most typical IMAP commands, for example.

[inigyou]

openssl s_client -host google.com -port 443

You're welcome. Works like netcat plus TLS. Kind of inconvenient though. Hey someone should write tlsnc.

[linzhangrun]

Nothing to regret. Text Protocol is too inefficient.

[account42]

Compared to inefficiencies in the average payload? No, it doesn't really matter.