Old BBS Hard drive backups wanted. reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-07 15:21 I've been looking for people that have the 90's equivalent of a site rip. Namely I'm looking for Ex-SYSOPs out there that may have one or more backups or full hard drive images of their old BBS's. I have only 2 so far. Great full copies of WWIV sites including the message bases stuck in time. Great to go back and look at a snap shot of what once was. If anyone would like to add a BBS image from back in the day, or heck even a current one to the list please let me know and we'll chat. At some point I'd like to make a small website that has them preserved and available for download, but for now not enough of them exist. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dmxrob · 2019-08-07 16:04 Good intentions, \*but\* this sounds like a privacy issue waiting to happen. Sure, that data may be two decades old by now, but there are still potential user files with user names, birthdates, maybe even addresses and phone numbers. I highly advise against this and would strongly recommend people not just hand over old backups. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackboxsqueezebeard · 2019-08-07 16:08 This sounds like there would be potential privacy concerns. We probably are not still using passwords from 25 years ago, but addresses and phone numbers from family homes might still be valid and their circulation unwanted. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-07 16:44 Tragic. Worrying about info that is being freely sucked out of us all day everyday online by Google Facebook and every other site and people should be worried about a 30 year old backup that "May" contain an address of someone that may be the same? Seriously, what info are they going to find? my 30 phone number and then what, are they going to prank call me? I highly doubt that there is ANY info contained on a BBS back up from 1993 that would make someone panic. Also keep in mind how limited the potential exposure would be. How many people on earth will have the ability to properly re-activate and search a 30 year old BBS package? How many people would not only have that ability, but also posses the desire to somehow expolit 30 year old data that wouldn't include SS numbers, CC numbers (30 year old numbers at that! ) or gasp... 30 year old phone numbers. I'd say a firm 0%, but thanks for trying to scare away folks from preserving a part of history. We'd better just let bit rot take them to the grave. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dmxrob · 2019-08-07 17:09 You may not care about privacy, but the rest of us do. And you put my personal information up so people can download it, I can guarantee you I will have no problem finding a lawyer to take on my case. Plus, how do I know what YOU are up to? Maybe you are just trying to collect this data for some no good reason. I don't know who you are or what your intentions are. It's obvious you have no clue when it comes to privacy to begin with, so .... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- dmxrob · 2019-08-07 17:10 Exactly. This guy has no idea what privacy is and wants us to just hand over data so he can do god knows what with it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EamonnMR · 2019-08-07 18:30 Might start looking there: [http://textfiles.com/](http://textfiles.com/) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SqualorTrawler · 2019-08-07 18:50 I find it interesting that to this day, there are bulletin board systems which ask an intrusive amount of information for logins, as was the case back in the old days. Systems which run old software in which these dialogs can't be suppressed may have an excuse, but they should (and some do; thanks to those who do) have a message saying, "You can put any info you want in for these questions." I agree with you and find this a spurious reason to leave data buried. You could stipulate up front that you don't want the personal data and just want the message bases, or that you will purge such information. But everyone suddenly caring about privacy when bulletin board systems routinely showed complete contempt for it (and some still do), is odd to me. I get why people don't want that information posted online; it can easily be removed. The data is old and almost all of the information on a person is easily searchable from the ten billion data mining companies online like Axiom (and far more up to date). This makes the BBS information far less interesting or important than what you can find on a person with a simple google search. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-07 23:48 Your not the rest of us, your just one paranoid dude. Good luck with that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-07 23:53 Pretty much. No one is interested in personal data from 30+ years ago. The VERY limited community that would be interested in viewing these old rips are interested in the sites themselves. The custom work, the message bases , all of it. Not sure where this guy immediately jumped to some panic mode where all of it is going to be used for some kind of negative reason, but I just can't see it happening. In a day and age where I can pay a few dollars to google and have access to every site they have visited EVER, why would I bother with what they posted 30 years ago about a Amiga problem they were having?? Certainly it would take little to no time to scrub the user database from these rips before posting if that is the hangup, but again, the chances of any info from these being used poorly is 0. I'd be way more worried about who has everything I've ever written on facebook and every google search I have ever done then this by a factor of about a billion, but hey, they make tin foil hats for a reason. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Byron_at_Diodati · 2019-08-08 02:32 Oh no! You might find a random phone number or address. Wait until you learn about the White Pages. There are literally thousands of addresses and phone numbers in there, and they just drop those off on the front porch every year or two. Not encrypted or anything! All snarkiness aside, I doubt anyone shared their SSN or CC numbers on a BBS. This was before digital photography was really a thing, so no identifying pictures. Most people didn't even use their real names. What is the worse case scenario? Seriously, I'm having a hard time thinking of what could possibly go wrong without concocting a ludicrous situation. A serial killer who find their victims from 25 year old BBS archives? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kirkman14 · 2019-08-08 13:01 I hope you are getting copies of these to Jason Scott of archive.org. Also, please consider posting/archiving the message bases on the web. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-08 15:43 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackboxsqueezebeard · 2019-08-08 18:46 I wouldn't be worried exclusively about the user data (though if it includes birthdays, we're getting into count me out territory), but more the private correspondence between users, which they might reasonably have expected to remain private. There might be gold in there, and also failed passes, deadbeat child support acrimony, direct threats and all kinds of underbelly content best left buried. Eleven years ago Waxy posted some 20-year-old internal correspondence he'd exhumed from an old Infocom hard drive, and shortly after a number of Implementors emerged from retirement to publicly weigh in and scold him for violating their privacy. https://waxy.org/2008/04/m illiways_infocoms_unreleased_sequel_to_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galax/ I don't see this proposal as materially different from that case, only even less in the public interest. Many underground BBSes didn't require authentic user details, but plenty of PD BBSes - the kinds that required call back verification - demanded it. Some services went further and required applicants to mail in photocopies of driver's licenses, so as to access age- restricted content. So I wouldn't assume that all user data was bogus anyway. Earlier today a BBS-era friend was reflecting elsewhere how though he left that community behind decades ago, old colleagues keep hunting him down and harassing him over long-forgotten disputes. If you ask who would hold a grudge for that long, you have your answer - the kind of obsessive weirdo to carry a torch for a defunct technology for decades is absolutely who. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- nevarro · 2019-08-08 23:30 I don't think he is speaking only for himself. BBSes in the past and even now can require an unnecessarily large amount of personal information to create an account. Even if the information is old, some of it may be accurate and become a legitimate privacy concern. I would pursue other ways to get old BBS data you're looking for. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 9600bps · 2019-08-09 01:14 While I agree that it is urgent for us to collect these old materials, I also agree with /u/dmxrob that confidentiality is key. In the 1980s and 1990s, BBSs felt like another world and people behaved as though they were in a secret place. Virtually no one expected that their messages might one day be posted on something like the Web or indexed by something like Google. One great example of handling this stuff thoughtfully was the restoration of Amsterdam's Digital City (De Digitale Stad, or DDS), a major city-wide BBS from the 1990s. Recently, a group of students got a snapshot and brought the system back to life. However, they were alarmed with the amount of personal information in the archive. Their solution was to donate the system to the Amsterdam Museum. During an exhibition, visitors to the museum could access the old system through terminals--even log into their old accounts!--but they did not connect it to the public web. They also posted a ton of other material to the web. The DDS interface was very cool and worth checking out if you haven't seen it before: [https://hart.amsterdam/nl/page/33430/over-het-project-re- dds](https://hart.amsterdam/nl/page/33430/over-het-project-re-dds) ) My hunch is that people would be even more enthusiastic to dig up and share their old backups if they knew that they were handing them to someone who would handle them with care and respect. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Byron_at_Diodati · 2019-08-09 01:48 You make some reasonable points, some activities on a BBS could have had an expectation of privacy. So it's probably fair that some information in whatever BBS backups exist should stay private, at least for a certain amount of time. Eventually that information should all be made public. Imagine if we found a previously unknown journal from an 18th century sea captain, or a civil war soldier, or a coal miner in 1907... Would anyone suggest it shouldn't be made available? The kind of understanding we can gain about the past from material like this is huge. So even if it's too soon to make all the information public now, we should be preserving it to make it available in the future. Most of it is gone already. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- blackboxsqueezebeard · 2019-08-09 02:35 I can get behind that proposal. Store it all for one hundred years, then throw open the data vaults. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ominous_squirrel · 2019-08-09 08:53 Your dismissiveness proves that you’re not going to be a good caretaker of this information. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ominous_squirrel · 2019-08-09 08:55 A lot of identity verification schemes these days actually ask stuff like “what street did you live on in 1998”. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ominous_squirrel · 2019-08-09 09:00 Worst case scenarios? People explored their sexualities and downloaded porn on old BBSes. Surely there’s blackmail info for a lot of people on old, forgotten hard drives. Stalkers often carry their obsessions for decades. Heck, Beto O’Rourke was active in the Cult of the Dead Cow scene. You betcha somebody would pay for his old emails. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-09 09:38 And yet, People have been sending me Copies. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-09 09:39 Thanks to the 3 guys that sent in copies yesterday. Anyone else want to share a moment from the past? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:08 i agree. and i'm not really paranoid. you're going to be seeing people's private information and their msgs and other exchanges public and private with other users. i dont think you should be doing this. and i think you have a shitty childish attitude. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:09 is it urgent to collect these old materials? whats dead is dead. not everything must be preserved. we lived it. preserving serves no true purpose sometimes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:11 people gave their information in trust to the sysop. wouldn't it be nice if you could rely on that trust and not EXPECT everything to be thrown out the window 10+ years later? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:12 that's a good point too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:12 shitty idea ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-12 03:51 sure they did ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2019-08-12 04:52 [deleted] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Farpoint_Farms · 2019-08-17 13:23 Why in the heck would I lie about something like that? I never come to reddit, and now I remember why. A bunch of nut jobs here. Thankfully the Alt.BBS usenet subs and more importantly BBS networked subs have proven to be much better places to gather these BBS backups for the collection. Perhaps old timers like myself have seen the need to preserve these. I have 9 now. I'm all about a good conspiracy, but dang, they really are not hiding behind EVERY corner. Most? Probably, but not every single one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2019-08-20 04:54 sure you do. it's your story, tell it how you wanna tell it.