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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

##########
#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!

[Main menu]

[Games]

[Files]

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#CONNECTION METHODS#
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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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#CONNECTION METHODS#
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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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