Port 1518 is officially registered with IANA for "Virtual Places video data" (vpvd), both TCP and UDP. If you've never heard of Virtual Places, you're not alone. The service has been dead for over two decades, but its port number lives on as a small monument to the wild optimism of the 1990s Internet.
What Virtual Places Was
Virtual Places Chat was software developed by an Israeli company called Ubique in the mid-1990s. The concept was audacious: any web page on the Internet could become a chat room. If you and a stranger were both viewing the same page with the VPChat program running, you could see each other, chat, and even share video.1
At its peak, Virtual Places drew tens of thousands of concurrent users at Excite, one of the major search engines of the era.2 People would gather on random web pages, turn on their webcams, and talk to strangers. This was before YouTube, before social media, before most people had broadband. Video chat over a 56k modem was barely functional, but it felt like the future.
The Corporate Shuffle
Virtual Places had the trajectory of many dot-com startups: acquired, re-acquired, and ultimately abandoned.
In 1995, AOL acquired Ubique. Three years later, in 1998, IBM bought Ubique from AOL. The Virtual Places technology was absorbed into IBM's Sametime, a corporate communication and collaboration platform.3 The consumer-facing chat service—the thing that made Virtual Places special—disappeared.
When Excite merged with @Home and crashed at the end of the dot-com boom, a group of former employees acquired the rights and tried to keep the dream alive at vpchat.com. It didn't last.
What Port 1518 Carries Now
Probably nothing. Virtual Places is gone. The software doesn't work on modern browsers. The company that created it no longer exists. But port 1518 remains officially registered for vpvd—Virtual Places video data.
This is common in the registered port range (1024-49151). Services are assigned ports, the services die, and the port numbers become digital tombstones. Nobody else claims them because they're still technically allocated. They just sit there, waiting for traffic that will never come.
Checking What's Listening
If you want to see if anything is actually using port 1518 on your system, you can check:
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something appears, it's almost certainly not Virtual Places. It could be malware (port 1518 has been associated with trojans in the past),4 or it could be a modern application that happened to grab an unused port. But it won't be a graphical chat room where strangers meet on web pages.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
Port 1518 is technically assigned, but functionally unassigned. This happens more often than you'd think. The IANA port registry is full of ghosts—protocols that were registered in the 1980s and 1990s for services that no longer exist.
These ports matter because they represent the Internet's history. Every assigned port was once someone's ambitious project. Some became essential infrastructure (HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on port 443). Others, like Virtual Places, had their moment and disappeared.
The port numbers remain. Digital archaeology.
Related Ports
- Port 80 — HTTP, the protocol that made web pages possible in the first place
- Port 443 — HTTPS, the encrypted version that replaced HTTP
- Port 5060-5061 — SIP, the modern protocol for voice and video calls over IP
- Port 3478 — STUN, used by WebRTC for peer-to-peer video chat
Virtual Places tried to do in 1995 what WebRTC does now. It was 20 years too early.
Security Considerations
Port 1518 has been flagged in the past as being used by trojans and malware.4 This doesn't mean the port itself is dangerous—it just means that because the port is essentially abandoned, malicious software sometimes uses it for command-and-control communication.
If you see unexpected traffic on port 1518, investigate. It's almost certainly not legitimate.
Frequently Asked Questions About Port 1518
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