NEWS.ERCAN.AI · teletext-style AI news over SSH and telnet

teletext for the LLM era · headlines for the prompt-pilled

SSH telnet HTTP/3 no GPU required

Connect

ssh news.ercan.ai
telnet news.ercan.ai

No accounts, no shell, no sign-up. Both transports listen on the standard ports · 22 for SSH, 23 for telnet · so the bare commands above just work. SSH accepts any username with any key (or empty password). Telnet has no auth at all. If your telnet binary is being weird, try nc news.ercan.ai 23.

What is NEWS.ERCAN.AI?

Screenshot of the NEWS.ERCAN.AI terminal interface: a Ceefax-style teletext TUI showing paginated AI news headlines with category tabs (Index, News, Blog, Research, Papers, Newsletter, Podcast, About, Stats), colour-coded page-number tiles, an ASCII block-letter NEWS.ERCAN.AI logo, and a vim-style status bar at the bottom.
The TUI you land in after ssh news.ercan.ai.

A public, anonymous server that drops you straight into a Ceefax-inspired teletext TUI of curated AI headlines. The whole thing is a single Go binary that listens on SSH (port 22) and telnet (port 23). About 50 hand-picked sources across six categories · news, blog, research, papers, newsletter, podcast · refreshed every 5 minutes. Items are kept on a 30-day rolling window inside an embedded SQLite database.

Use it like Ceefax: type a three-digit page number to jump (P200, P400, P600…), use j/k to walk a list, Enter to drill into an article, Esc to back out. Vim users will feel at home; everyone else gets a footer with the keys spelled out.

What's inside

P200
blog
P400
news
P500
newsletter
P600
papers
P700
podcast
P800
research

FAQ

Is it really anonymous?

Yes. SSH accepts any username with any public key, falling back to an empty password. Telnet has no auth. There is no signup, no cookies, no tracking · only the visit counters you can see on the STATS page (P198).

How do I navigate?

j/k or arrow keys to move the row cursor, h/l to flip pages, Tab / Shift+Tab to cycle categories, Enter to drill in, Esc to back out, : for command mode (e.g. :news, :200, :about), / for filter, ? for help. Single letters jump direct: n=news, b=blog, r=research, p=papers, e=newsletter, o=podcast, a=about, s=stats. Three digits = page jump.

What stack runs this?

Go with charmbracelet/wish for SSH, bubbletea for the TUI loop, lipgloss for styling, gofeed for RSS/Atom parsing, and modernc.org/sqlite (pure-Go, no CGO) for the rolling item database. The binary is statically linked and runs as an unprivileged news-ai user under a hardened systemd unit + AppArmor profile.

Is it secure?

Service runs as a non-root user with CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE only, behind a strict NoNewPrivileges + ProtectSystem=strict + syscall-filter sandbox, with an AppArmor profile pinning filesystem access. Public ports are rate-limited via ufw. Admin SSH lives on a non-standard port with key-only auth and fail2ban. Items DB is backed up nightly.

Why teletext?

Because the AI news cycle is overwhelming and Ceefax was beautiful. Three digits, one keypress, and you're reading. No infinite scroll. No autoplay. No notifications. Page numbers are forever.

Can I add a feed?

Reach out on X or LinkedIn with the feed URL and a category. The list is curated by hand.

About the creator

Ercan Ermis. Works with AWS and AI (Claude). Likes terminals more than dashboards. Reach out about anything: AWS, LLMs, agentic systems, terminal craftsmanship, or just to say hi.

Credits

Source list is curated by hand. Thanks to Alp Ozcan for keeping it accurate and up to date.