The New Stelex Sector BBS, Toronto Canada. To advertise on this page or add your link please send e-mail.

By Roman Kowalczuk, T.N.S.S. Operator. Last minor updates 06/16/2008

*Note:* this file may not be complete. These pages are optimized for browsers such as MSIE, Netscape Navigator and Opera, as well as Lynx. If you find you are having trouble accessing something, please send e-mail. The main BBS was still down in... ah... mid-June which is when this page was last updated.

Ahoy mate! CAST OFF already! Arf arf

Welcome back to what's left of the BBS. There wasn't much to report here in the summer of 2008. Lots of thunderstorms, and, it seems, extreme weather events. About the only way to keep a system up at these times is to have geographically-distributed hot sites.

We were still searching for BBS software and solutions in the early summer... you may recall the BBS booted fine in local mode, last year, which was maddening. A new server had been brought forward, and we were going to go on-line with a USR Courier 9600 modem. The old BBS number is kind of in limbo.

Here is a strange web page posted by that BBS documentary guy. He's attempting to put together a sort of BBS "history" and he has a list where people have added historical comments - http://bbslist.textfiles.com/comments.html


In Toronto the transit authority reaped great publicity over their apparent $21 million-dollar-plus plan to install... unspecified... cameras on the subways and busses. City councillor Joe Mihevc seems to feel this is "vital to the security" of the TTC. Read Privacy International's take on this one.

A summer 2007 item in Adbusters, "Rise of the Internet Police State", mentioned Echelon.

See also www.guardian.co.uk and also Wired's coverage of Privacy International's 2003 Big Brother Awards

I have also re-posted a sub-page about the Jerry Garcia hack on USENET.

An experimental YaBB ("Yet Another Bulletin Board") is running at http://users.boardnation.com/~stelexbbs.

Total Information Awareness

WIRED... had a good item up a few years back re: John Pointdexter and the Total Information Awareness project (see Dec. 2, 2002 WIRED item). The Toronto Star covered this item on November 14, 2002... as well a NYT piece about this mentioned Ray Ozzie and Lotus Notes.

From all reports there seemed to be a vigourous debate going on about this [war on terror] south of the border. Even the librarians were wading into the fray. One of the WIRED items... dealt with the congressional backlash over TIA.

See also this Defense Dept. briefing.

See also this item on total "travel information awareness".

We've seen at least one mention in early 2007 of TIA continuing, under the rader as it were, under various different names and funding schemes. For more background on TIA research, see also "Pentagon spy database moves forward", a Feb. 28, 2003 item by Declan McCullagh at zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-990497.html.

Minor updates - I updated the little Dvorak page here on these mirror pages a while back there. We finally tried one of the new versions of "Mavis Beacon" and lo and behold, it does not support the Dvorak keyboard layout. Stay away from v.15 and v.16! IIRC we last tried V9 but it did not seem to be XP-compatible.

Meet Big Brother

Big Brother is big business, and all of a sudden the Toronto Police Service wants to get in on the act. See the link to my sub-page on Geocities which criticizes some of the force's current "plans". See also the TTC item above.

There were continuing mentions of Big Brother in the mainstream media as recently as last summer. In particular Bell Canada is or was up to something with respect to user records.

(Flashback to a few years ago, now) There were big noises from the federal privacy commissioner in November 2002; Radwanski was urging the nation not to go overboard in the war on terror. The previous link should contain the privacy comissioner's official statement from a couple of years ago. (Other links we had up have since expired.)

From all reports, Big Brother is flexing his political muscle in Ottawa and Washington. Besides the flap over the national I.D. card, the Cdn Justice dept. put forward a proposal, a while back, to require system administrators to keep tabs on customers and there was a call for comments on this plan. The story made the front page of the newspapers a few weeks back and when we last checked the "consultation period" had been extended to December 16, 2002. The current issue of Computing Canada has a recap on this; see also this 2003 Guardian item on the snoopers charter.

(End of file.)

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Some headlines we were following

About the system... filename = about.htm

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Miscellaneous items - potpourri.htm

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THE URL FOR THE PAGE YOU ARE VIEWING IS http://webhome.idirect.com/~stelex/latest.html

OLDER MIRROR COPIES OF THIS PAGE MAY EXIST AT THE PRESIDIO IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

Past news files on the BBS go back almost twenty years. Unfortunately the (416) 658-1295 number is temporarily down

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