Subj : Re: SSH on BBSes
To   : boraxman
From : Andre
Date : Mon Apr 04 2022 06:20:55

 bo> Correct, the effect was the same. If I posted a message to a friend on
 bo> Paranoimia BBS, or even engaged in thread, it wasn't the same as tweeting
 bo> it to the world. 

There's a fundamental difference between your position, and even those who would agree with you about privacy (it's important) and large corporations (unethical and run by morons).

We always understood that posting on message boards was not private. In fact, in the early days it was worse in some ways because you knew some of those people in the real world, and they knew people that you knew. The things you wrote could have personal implications. Now? It goes into your uber provile and you get more invasive advertising, and potentially in the future financial insurance, healthcare, or government effects.

But of all the things you and your household do on the internet... your searches, the pages you view with your shared IP, the tokens that track all of your phones when you leave the house and use the internet, all your data that is sold and shared, your map/wifi data, etc. ..... What you write on Fidonet is smaller than a drop in the bucket. It's more like one molecule in the bucket.

BBS software has always been massively insecure. Passwords have always been stored in plaintext. Sysops have always had full access to your personal mail. Not much later, posts were sent all over WWIV, Fidonet, DOVE-net, and many more. There is simply no expectation of privacy and there never has been any.

As for gating your posts to the internet? Again, it's been done for decades. You are posting on a "public" forum... that's literally the point of a BBS. I would expect that my private BBS email/netmail isn't put on the web interface to be crawled by search engines, but that's the extent of my privacy expectations. 


- Andre
--- SBBSecho 3.15-Linux
 * Origin: Radio Mentor BBS - bbs.radiomentor.org (21:3/117)

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