Port 1410 was officially registered for HiQ License Manager, a component of National Instruments' HiQ software—a graphical environment for numerical analysis and data visualization that existed in the 1990s.
The software is gone now. The port registration isn't.
What Was HiQ?
In the early 1990s, National Instruments purchased the rights to HiQ, a Macintosh-based integrated environment for numerical analysis and data visualization.1 They released Windows versions through the mid-to-late 1990s, with version 4.0 supporting ActiveX controls and modern (for the time) integration features.
HiQ was eventually absorbed into LabVIEW, National Instruments' flagship platform.2 The standalone product disappeared. But when they registered port 1410 with IANA for the HiQ License Manager, that registration became permanent.
The Port That Outlived Its Software
This is what happens to port registrations. Port 1410 is officially assigned to "hiq" in the IANA registry—TCP and UDP, registered to Rick Pugh.3 The software it was meant to serve hasn't been actively developed or sold in decades, but the port remains allocated.
Nobody is running HiQ License Manager anymore. But if you scan a network and find port 1410 open, the registry will still tell you it belongs to HiQ.
What Range Is This Port In?
Port 1410 falls in the registered ports range (1024-49151). These are ports that organizations can request from IANA for specific services. They're not reserved for system services like the well-known ports (0-1023), and they're not completely free-for-all like the dynamic/ephemeral ports (49152-65535).
When you register a port in this range, you're making a claim: "We're using this port for this purpose." The claim lasts forever, even if the purpose doesn't.
Could Something Else Be Using This Port?
Technically, yes. Port registrations aren't enforced by the operating system—they're conventions. Any software can listen on any port if nothing else is already using it.
If you find port 1410 open on a system, it's almost certainly not HiQ License Manager. It could be:
- Custom software that chose 1410 arbitrarily
- Malware (port 1410 has been observed in use by various trojans over the years4)
- Network testing tools
- Anything else that needed a port and picked this one
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
These commands will show you if anything is actually listening on port 1410, and what process is doing it. If you find something, it's not going to be HiQ.
Why Unassigned (or Zombie) Ports Matter
The port registry is full of entries like this—services that were registered decades ago and never unregistered. Port 1410 isn't technically unassigned, but it might as well be. The service is extinct.
This matters because the registry is finite. There are 64,535 usable ports (0-65535), and thousands are registered to services that no longer exist. Modern systems don't care much—they use dynamic port allocation for most things. But the registry itself becomes a kind of archaeological record.
Port 1410 is a marker. It says: "In the 1990s, National Instruments built something that needed license management over the network. They registered a port. The software died. The registration didn't."
That's the Internet for you. Everything persists. Even the ghosts.
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