Of BBSing and BBSers
Going through this slashdot thread: "Not Really", discussing BBSing back in the day (early-mid '90's), and how to make a darknet like they were, disconnected from the main internet, and all the privacy issues this causes.
There is some interesting talk, mostly me theorizing, about a Wi-Fi WAN or MAN, that runs on the same principles of a BBS, but would be more convenient and secure. It would be disconnected from the internet proper, completely, and rely on land lines for connections out of area. Each node would broadcast, and it would be nondistrubuted, meaning each node would carry only encrypted peices of the messages or data. It would be best if the land lines were nondistributed as well. This was only a local person, in area, could sniff that their is Wi-Fi activity, but with encryption, and a modified protocol, it would be almost impossible to see the type of data. With redundancy, and some form of HASH based anonymous protocol this would be very secure, and very resilient to point failures. Does anyone know of a system like this implicated? Or how hard it would be to actually make this?
I don't know enough about the requisite technologies to further conceptualize this.
And as a brief aside, the site linked in the title might prove a nice walk down memory lane for all of us who used to be around in the halcyon days of BBSing. Someplace in the /. thread there is a telnet link to a wildcat BBS still floating around. It even has the old LoRD (Legend of the Red Dragon) door floating around on it.
Related Tags: BBS . Doors . Darknet . Wi-Fi . WAN . MAN . Decentralized . Distributed . Networks . Privacy . LoRD . VPN . Secure Network
1 comment:
just wanted to let everybody know that bbsing is still alive in some form, via telnet.
there's a list of bbses here http://telnetbbsguide.com/
you have to weed through a bunch to find decent bbses, but it's worth it.
Also check out http://www.myspace.com/bbses for more bbs information, especially for those
people that are using vista, you have to enable the telnet client.
a good client is mt32, you can get it at http://ozone.eesc.com
i'd like to see more GOOD people in the bbs scene, so i'm working on getting people involved again!
have a good one!
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