Port 1010: SURF — The Assigned Port With No Documentation

What Port 1010 Is

Port 1010 is a well-known system port—meaning it falls in the 0–1023 range, reserved by IANA for officially assigned services.¹ Unlike thousands of other ports in this range, 1010 has an assignment: a service called SURF, registered to Joseph Geer.²

That's the sum total of public information about it.

The Mystery of SURF

Port 1010 is assigned. It has a name. Both TCP and UDP are supported. And then... nothing. There is no RFC documenting the SURF protocol. There is no public specification. A search through technical resources yields only the registration itself—the port number, the name, the contact. Nothing about what SURF actually does, what problem it solves, or whether anything still listens on 1010 in the year 2026.

This is not technically unusual. Many well-known ports receive assignments and disappear from public view. Some were experimental. Some were internal tools that never scaled. Some were claimed but never implemented. Port 1010 may be any of these.

What This Reveals

The gap between "assigned" and "documented" is wider than most people realize. When you see port 1010 in a port scanner's output, the designation "SURF" tells you almost nothing. It doesn't tell you if it's actually running anywhere. It doesn't tell you what to expect if you connect. It's a name without a story.

This matters because the IANA registry is the Internet's official record of what ports mean. When that record goes silent, a port becomes a mystery. Port 1010 is not broken or misconfigured—it's simply undocumented, and that's its own kind of transparency failure.

Checking What's Actually Listening

To see if port 1010 is listening on your system:

Linux/macOS:

lsof -i :1010
netstat -an | grep 1010

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :1010

If you see a process listening on 1010, it will tell you more than the official registry does. Whatever you find will be more informative than "SURF."

The Lesson

Port 1010 is a reminder that the Internet's infrastructure isn't all transparency and clarity. Some assignments are honored in the registry but nowhere else. Some ports carry traffic that nobody bothers to document. And sometimes, "officially registered" is just a name without meaning.

This is fine, actually. Not every port needs a detailed specification. But it's worth noticing that the gap exists—that between the official record and the lived Internet, there are shadows.