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#THE BBS ZINE#
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#BY MHJ#
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#Issue 5 - For the week of 9/29/19 - 10/5 #
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#Date Published - 10/06/19 #
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#New Energy#
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Index:
Foreward
Alley Cat
ALTERANT
Music and BBSes
Security and Privacy and BBSes
Game of the Week
Music of the Moment
Links
Outro
Contact
Next Issue Preview

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#Foreward#
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I’ve been thinking about BBSes more, and the more I grow to understand them, the more I like them. They truly were the beginning of independant, local and autonomous net communities. Recently I heard that the US government is asking that they put backdoors into the encryption of Facebook’s and Whatsapp’s messaging system. I think that’s a huge privacy violation… if they start at those big sites, what’s to say that they won’t ask the same for every encrypted system? Not only would it would be bad privacy-wise if they did that, but they would be more liable to shoot themselves in the foot by doing so, because black hat hackers would probably make short work of the backdoors and sell those exploits to the highest bidder on the market.

In any case, I feel BBSes, if they got more secure, would be immune to these sorts of things, simply because they’re not as well-known anymore.I know that many BBSes continue to use telnet as their primary method of connection due to nostalgic reasons, but maybe, because of the above topic, they should transition to more secure alternatives of connection and encrypt user and system data. I hope any BBS owners reading this will consider implementing it.

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#Alley Cat#
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I like the name and the art for this BBS. It didn’t seem to have much in the way of files or games, but that’s ok. Let’s give them some new users and make a huge community there!

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telnet://alleycat.synchro.net

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#ALTERANT #
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ALTERANT wouldn’t let me finish registration and that sucks, because I was really looking forward to trying it out… if you know where to get in touch with the SysOp and let them know that registering doesn’t work, drop me a line!

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telnet://alterant.leenooks.net

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#Music and BBSes#
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I personally have never heard music playing from a BBS, but I do know that on the older systems that BBSes ran on, music was a highly praised feature. The C64 and Amiga are famous machines that boasted impressive sound chips, so I can see much of the BBS scene devoted to music created on those.

If anyone knows more about this topic, please send me something, I would love to hear from you about it!

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#Security and Privacy and BBSes#
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As I stated in the foreward, most BBSes are, at this point, lax about encryption, security and privacy. I am not suggesting that BBSes become glorified Unix shells, just that more should care about these sorts of things.

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#Links#
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Ars Technica’s article on the Facebook backdoor: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/the-broken-record-why-barrs-call-against-end-to-end-encryption-is-nuts/

The mod archive: https://modarchive.org/

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#Game of the Week#
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No game this week, but expect one next week!

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#Music of the Moment#
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The Epic Commodore C64 SID Collection - 11 Hours of C64 Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9Racui9jJI

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#Outro#
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I hope you enjoyed this issue of the BBS zine, and if you have any suggestions on how I can improve, see below to drop me a line!

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#Contact#
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For questions, concerns, comments and anything else, please contact me at the following: mhj@sdf.org

Thank you.

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#Next Issue#
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BBSes:
Amateur Radio BBS
Amiga Frontier
Columns:
Null: A DOS BBS Zine
BBS Real Time Chatting
File Sharing and BBSes
Game of the Week
Music of the Moment
Links

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