a self-hosted node · built, bolted & run by marba$ · DEF CON 34
A bulletin board that lives inside a hard hat. Dial in from anywhere: telnet connect.skullbbs.com 2323
SKULL BBS is a real bulletin board system: message boards, door games, file areas, all of it, running on a Raspberry Pi bolted inside a hard hat.
It carries its own cellular uplink (an LTE modem hat, a hat inside the hat) and tunnels out to this address, so the board on someone's head is dialable from anywhere on Earth. This site is just the front door. The board itself lives at telnet connect.skullbbs.com 2323.
The board also keeps a honeypot on port 22: a fake, sloppy-looking login left open as bait. Real scanners find it and try to break in around the clock, and every attempt gets logged. None of them are anywhere near the real board; they are just knocking on a decoy. Type 'intruders' to watch them try, live.
Because the net used to be something you built, not something you were fed.
In the 1980s, before the platforms, you found your people by dialing into boards someone ran out of a spare room. Small places with their own rules, hosted by a person, not a company. No feed deciding what you saw. No algorithm selling your attention. You showed up because you wanted to, and you had to know how to get there.
This is that idea dragged forward and bolted into a hard hat, a working answer to DEF CON 34's Agency theme. The most agency you can have over a corner of the internet is to host it yourself, on hardware you can hold, that answers to nobody. No feed. No algorithm. No billionaires in bunkers. Just a node. Mine, and yours too, if you dial in.
[ hard hat ] Pi Zero 2 W + Mystic BBS
| uplink: LTE modem hat
v
frp tunnel --> VPS --> connect.skullbbs.com --> you
The skull rides its own LTE signal out to a small always-on relay that holds the public address. When the signal drops, so does the carrier, which is what the lamp is watching.
telnet connect.skullbbs.com 2323
ssh -p 2222 yourhandle@connect.skullbbs.com (add -c aes256-cbc; the board's crypto is proudly vintage)
For the full ANSI experience use a BBS terminal like SyncTERM (syncterm.bbsdev.net). Point its telnet mode at port 2323. Plain telnet works too; it'll just be less pretty. New callers welcome.