Port 769: Vid — The video service that never was

Port 769 carries the name "vid"—short for video. It was registered in the early days of the Internet as a well-known port for video streaming and file sharing.¹ The registration appears in RFC 1700, the historic Assigned Numbers document that cataloged all official port assignments.²

But here's the thing: the vid protocol was never actually documented. No RFC describes how it works. No software implements it. No one uses it.

Port 769 is a ghost—officially registered but functionally forgotten.

What Is a Well-Known Port?

Ports 0-1023 are called well-known ports. They're reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for standardized services that everyone agrees on. HTTP uses port 80. HTTPS uses port 443. SSH uses port 22.³

These assignments matter because they create predictability. When you type a URL into your browser, it knows to try port 443 for HTTPS without you having to specify it. Well-known ports are the Internet's way of saying "this service always lives here."

Port 769 was supposed to be one of these predictable addresses—the place you'd always find video streaming. But the service never materialized.

Why Ports Get Registered But Never Used

In the early Internet (1970s-1990s), getting a port number registered was relatively easy. If you had an idea for a service, you could request a port assignment from IANA. The registry grew quickly, filled with optimistic reservations for services that might someday exist.

Some of those services became foundational infrastructure. Others never got past the idea stage.

Vid appears to be one of the latter. Someone reserved port 769 for video streaming, but either the protocol was never built, or it was built and abandoned, or it existed briefly and left no trace.

The Internet is full of these ghosts—port numbers assigned to services that never took off, protocols that never got written, ideas that stayed ideas.

Security Considerations

Because port 769 has no legitimate widely-used service, seeing traffic on this port is unusual. Security researchers have occasionally observed malware using port 769 for command-and-control communications.⁴⁵

This is common for abandoned or rarely-used ports. If no one expects traffic there, malicious actors sometimes use them precisely because they won't be noticed.

If you see unexpected connections on port 769, investigate. Check what's listening:

# On Linux/macOS
sudo lsof -i :769

# On Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :769

Legitimate use of port 769 is extraordinarily rare. Most traffic on this port warrants scrutiny.

The Well-Known Ports That Disappeared

Port 769 isn't alone. The well-known port range (0-1023) contains dozens of assignments to services that never materialized or fell into disuse:

• Port 95: SUPDUP (a terminal protocol that lost to Telnet)
• Port 101: HOSTNAME (a service for looking up hostnames that predated DNS)
• Port 315: LOAD (for remote program loading)

These ports are fossils—evidence of paths the Internet didn't take, services that seemed important at the time but didn't survive.

Why Keep These Assignments?

You might wonder: if vid doesn't exist, why not reassign port 769 to something else?

The answer is inertia and caution. Removing a port assignment is difficult because you can never be entirely sure no one is using it somewhere. Even obscure protocols sometimes have niche implementations running in forgotten corners of the Internet.

Additionally, the well-known port range is effectively full. Modern services don't get well-known ports anymore—they use registered ports (1024-49151) or dynamic ports (49152-65535) instead.³

So port 769 remains assigned to vid, a protocol that may never have existed, for a service no one uses.

What This Port Teaches Us

Port 769 is a reminder that the Internet we have is not the Internet people imagined. Every port assignment represents a hypothesis about what the network would become. Most of those hypotheses were wrong.

The ports that matter today—80, 443, 53, 22, 25—weren't necessarily the ones people thought would matter in 1980. And the services we'll depend on in 2040 probably aren't the ones we're building today.

The registry is full of optimism and failure in equal measure. Port 769 is both.