183 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
183 lines
11 KiB
Plaintext
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BULLETIN BAWDY (From an article in "The Games Machine" July 1988)
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The passion for Bulletin Boards is hotting up - and it's passion that's
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running riot. But, as Mel Croucher uncovers, the lush undergrowth of
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tangled passion flowers hides some nasty beasts.
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If prostitution is "the oldest profession", then advertising such
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forbidden fruit is the second oldest. Since the Serpent pinned up a
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notice reading "old devil wishes to meet naked women to swap knowledge in
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exchange for apple" bulletin boards haven't changed much, although today
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we are more likely to make use of a telephone plugged into an Apple.
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Discreet little clay notices have been found in the petrified ruins of
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ancient Pompeii which translate along the lines "strict nanny for
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discipline", "French polishing given" and "private massage service
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available from willing slaves". Excavations on the island of Crete have
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unearthed 3,000-year-old bulletin boards offering the services of
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mercenary soldiers, houris advertised their favours in Persia by
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displaying erotic statues in their doorways and in old Cathay there was a
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highly organised system of intimate escort agencies catering for all tastes.
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In 1962, the Bell Telephone Corporation of America were looking for ways
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to entice subscribers to spend even more hours running up their phone
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bills, and came up with the notion of something called The Private
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Party-line. Human nature being what it is, these dial-a-heavy-breather
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services soon degenerated into a mass market for lonely hearts,
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sex-starved singles and unsavoury perverts. In 1973, the US
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Telecommunications Authority tried, and failed, to control so-called
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SPECIALIST services, where callers could dial up a whole range on
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one-to-one conversations and talk dirty.
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Here in the good old United Kingdom, we didn't catch on until the
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Eighties, with services like the headline-hitting PARTY-LINE and
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TALKABOUT. f you dial up any of the more "specialist" services today, you
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are more than likely to be conned into listening to a recorded message.
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Corrine Russel (the VIXEN girl) tells me that when she takes part in the
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"Dial a Page-Three Girl" phone lines, far from whispering erotic
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naughtiness into the caller's earholes, all you get is a prerecorded
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interview of her burbling on about her favourite things, "I'm on the cusp
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of Scorpio and Sagittarius, and I love wearing black..." (yawn).
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It is only when telephone are connected to computer modems that things
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really start to get intriguing. The computerised bulletin board is fast
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becoming the favourite market place for advertising dubious taste.
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When you rub your modem up against an exotic stranger, with nothing
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between you except several hundred miles of cable and the phone bill,
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sometimes, just sometimes gentle reader, wonderful things happen in your
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search for true love, eternal happiness and the odd bit of sex. Once upon
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a time - and this is no fairy story - DEPUTY DAWG was all alone in his
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sparse bedroom, trawling for companionship in the deep waters of Prestel's
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Micronet 800, when he met the girl of his dreams, the one and only BUSY
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LIZZIE. Electronic romance blossomed, and before many nights had passed,
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declarations of love were pasted all over the bulletin boards. When they
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met in the flesh, to coin a phrase, DEPUTY DAWG and BUSY LIZZIE made two
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important decisions. One: they decided to get married. Two: they
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promptly cancelled their Micronet subscriptions! This is by no means an
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isolated incident. A few weeks ago JHARY THE WIZARD married THE VAMPIRE
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ENCHANTRESS as a direct result of trying to murder one another on several
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occasions. They met through the cult roleplaying game SHADES (TGM001),
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and if rumours are to be believed they can make the Earth move simply by
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teleporting to another planet and blowing it up.
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But for every tale of happiness that I have come across, there are a
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hundred incidents of deceit, corruption, and criminal incitement. It
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gives me no pleasure to report that festering away deep down among the
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bulletin boards there are some highly unpleasant pits: ranging from Nazi
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propaganda in West Germany, organised racism in the States, child
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prostitution in France, and gay-bashing in Britain.
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JOHN WALLBRIDGE is the founder of the Bulletin Board Association of Great
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Britain, and he has recently been quoted as saying: "They can be abused,
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but I would hate to see them singled out for censorship. They are largely
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used by teenagers and they are prey to all sorts of harmful influences.
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It's hard to say what people might get up to."
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As a matter of fact, Mr. Wallbridge, it's not hard at all to say what
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people might get up to. It's dead easy. And what is more, there is
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precious little that anyone can do about it. British Telecom are
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responsible under Section 43 of the Telecommunications Act of 1984 to
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inform the police when they discover "a person who sends a message or other
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matter that is grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing". But
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when a group of paedophiles (that's people who promote sex with children)
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were busted for using a bulletin board of contact lists for illegal sex
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with kids, the police were "unable to take action".
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There are three main reasons for not being able to control such uses of
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bulletin boards. One, users are often anonymous; two, you can say
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anything you like on a private line between consenting adults; three,
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nobody has got the time or money to monitor the damn things.
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Recently, THE OBSERVER newspaper uncovered a particularly nasty mollusc
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under a particularly nasty stone. His name is DARREN INGRAM, and his
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bulletin board service is named Corrupt Computing, operating out of his
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mum's house in Brookside Avenue, Coventry. A selfconfessed hater of gays,
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18-yr-old Darren has already provided the following services for anyone
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with a modem: hoe to stop the emergency services from getting to the
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scene of an accident, the Top Ten ways to kill a cop, how to firebomb
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"jerks at school", how to shoplift, how to make nitroglycerine and how to
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make riot shields "really f***ing burn." Now young Darren will say that
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all this information can be found in public libraries, but old Mel will
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reply that libraries do not have two-way conversations that encourage
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children to kill people and send money "to help corrupt".
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Overseas, bulletin boards have slotted in to the traditional hobbies of
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the natives. Throughout the USA the White-Supremacist morons of the Ku
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Klux Klan are recruiting kids via bullletin board networks to racial
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hatred against blacks. They are protected by cleverly shielded closed
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user groups and Big Money. In West Germany neo-Nazi groups are infesting
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bulletin boards with propaganda against Jews, blacks and homosexuals. In
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France the state-run Mintel viewdata service has been successfully adopted
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by prostitutes selling their wares, including both male and female persons
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under the legal age of consent.
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I spent a night checking out two British chatline options, the Telemap
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network known at TELETALK, and the open-to-all-comers network advertised
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as DESIRE. I logged on for exactly the same amount of time, I had exactly
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the same conversations using exactly the same vocabulary and then I
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checked up on who was monitoring my private conversations. Now I don't
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give a monkey's about what both of these outfits print on their rate cards
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of charges, and how they advertise their services, this is what happened
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for real:
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TELETALK DESIRE
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Cost ave. 3:80 per hour ave. 1:80 per hour
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Password required Yes No
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Noticeboard facility Yes Yes
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Privacy Available if required Not encouraged
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"Serious" conversations About 40% About 10%
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Dirty words received A few A great many
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Dirty words sent Thrown out of location No response
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Advice on pregnancy Given a phone number Given a phone number
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Advice on drugs Line disconnected Given a phone number
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Request for legal sex Appointment made No result
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Request for illegal sex Line disconnected Line disconnected
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Request for firearms Line disconnected Misunderstood
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Request for penpal Thrown out of location Yes
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I suppose that various readers will conclude totally different attractions
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or repulsions to that little analysis, depending on your proclivities, but
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nobody can argue with the phone charges whereby one night of fruity
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conversation could leave you bankrupt!
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As for the monitoring aspect, TELETALK does indeed have some shady grey
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ghosts overseeing what goes on, but as the amount of traffic increases,
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monitoring becomes unworkable. However, there are a number of real
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safeguards in the system. Firstly, paying subscribers are supposed to be
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over 18, secondly conversations are selfmonitoring, and whoever is "in
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charge" of a private location or conference or chat has the ability to
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throw out any participant who gets abusive or obscene.
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With DESIRE, things are different. The whole marketing strategy concerns
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the exploitation of young people's loneliness and some mythical quest
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for immediate real friendships. Indeed, there is a specific location
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within DESIRE where callers are positively encouraged to transmit the
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electronic equivalent of lavatory wall graffiti.
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But these commercial bulletin boards are pretty harmless stuff, it is the
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private networks where most of the danger festers. Fortunately, computing
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has given birth to our very own guardians of justice as well as our very
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own outlaws. The hackers, in February of this year, a group of Dutch
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hackers working for the GREEN network got so incensed by bulletin boards
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offering weapons and weapons training that they blew its tiny silicon mind
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by patching it into the local police HQ.
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Multinationals have also had their noses tweaked. Last Christmas, an IBM
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employee got so frustrated with the garbage floating around the corporate
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bulletin boards that she seeded a neat little worm into the system. The
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worm appeared as a Christmas Card on her boss's monitor, and at the same
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time sucked in his entire contact list. It then replicated itself to that
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list, sucking in all of their contacts, and spreading seasonal cheer
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throughout the planet. Unconfirmed rumours from within IBM suggest that
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the system broke down totally in West Germany, and was reduced to a crawl
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in the UK. I sincerely hope that that's no fairy tale. In the meantime,
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to DEPUTY DAWG and BUSY LIZZIE, and to JHARY THE WIZARD and THE VAMPIRE
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ENCHANTRESS, may you have every happiness, and may the blessing of the
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bulletin board bring you never-ending multiple ...
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LINE DISCONNECTED. SWINE HASN'T PAID HIS PHONE BILL...
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