Newsgroups

Great Renaming

Great Renaming

The {flag day} in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the {Usenet} had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources." There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.

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# 5/22/2009 02:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

(TM)

(TM)

[Usenet] ASCII rendition of the (TM) appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents and look and feel lawsuits. See also {UN*X}.

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# 5/20/2009 11:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

ARMM

ARMM:

[acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet, cancelbot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages. ARMM's bug produced a recursive {cascade} of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer. Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term {despew}), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. The Usenet thread on the subject is archived here. Compare Great Worm; sorcerer's apprentice mode.





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# 5/20/2009 10:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

McQuary limit

McQuary limit

[from the name of the founder of alt.fan.warlord; see {warlording}.] 4 lines of at most 80 characters each, sometimes still cited on Usenet as the maximum acceptable size of a {sig block}. Before the great bandwidth explosion of the early 1990s, long sigs actually cost people running Usenet servers significant amounts of money. Nowadays social pressure against long sigs is intended to avoid waste of human attention rather than machine bandwidth. Accordingly, the McQuary limit should be considered a rule of thumb rather than a hard limit; it's best to avoid sigs that are large, repetitive, and distracting. See also {warlording}.

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# 5/19/2009 10:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

PFY

PFY

[Usenet; common, originally from the {BOFH} mythos] Abbreviation for Pimply-Faced Youth. A {BOFH} in training, esp. one apprenticed to an elder BOFH aged in evil.

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# 5/19/2009 08:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

TAN

TAN

[Usenet, particularly rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan] Abbrev. of `tangent', as in "off on a tangent", and synonym for {OT}. A number of hacker-humor synonyms are used for TAN in some newsgroups. Instances such as BEIGE, OFF-WHITE, BROWNISH-GRAY, and LIGHT BROWN have been observed. It is generally understood on newsgroups with this convention that any color descriptor is a TAN synonym if (a) used as the first word(s) of the topic of a Usenet post, (b) written in ALL CAPS, and (c) followed immediately by a colon. Usage: "OFF-WHITE: 2000 Presidential candidates" on an SF newsgroup.

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# 5/19/2009 05:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

bboard

PITTSBURGH - APRIL 15: Presidential candidate... Image by Getty Images via Daylife

bboard

[contraction of `bulletin board']
  1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of {BBS} systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a Usenet {newsgroup} (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks one either as a {newbie} fresh in from the BBS world or as a real old-timer predating Usenet).
  2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards.
  3. The term physical bboard is sometimes used to refer to an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge.
    In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".

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# 5/19/2009 10:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

cracker

cracker

One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker} (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish worm in this sense around 1981--82 on Usenet was largely a failure.

Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. The neologism "cracker" in this sense may have been influenced not so much by the term "safe-cracker" as by the non-jargon term "cracker", which in Middle English meant an obnoxious person (e.g., "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?" -- Shakespeare's King John, Act II, Scene I) and in modern colloquial American English survives as a barely gentler synonym for "white trash".

While it is expected that any real hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic techniques, anyone past {larval stage} is expected to have outgrown the desire to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).

Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the {mundane} reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers often like to describe themselves as hackers, most true hackers consider them a separate and lower form of life. An easy way for outsiders to spot the difference is that crackers use grandiose screen names that conceal their identities. Hackers never do this; they only rarely use noms de guerre at all, and when they do it is for display rather than concealment.

Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone else's has to be pretty {losing}. Some other reasons crackers are looked down on are discussed in the entries on {cracking} and {phreaking}. See also {samurai}, {dark-side hacker}, and {hacker ethic}. For a portrait of the typical teenage cracker, see {warez d00dz}.

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# 5/18/2009 11:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

grilf

grilf

Girlfriend. Like {newsfroup} and {filk}, a typo reincarnated as a new word. Seems to have originated sometime in 1990 on {Usenet}. [A friend tells me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel Watchers Of The Dark, in which alien species after species goes insane and begins to chant "Grilf! Grilf!". A human detective eventually determines that the word means "Liar!" I hope this has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term. --ESR]

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# 5/18/2009 07:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

kit

kit

[Usenet; poss.: fr.: {DEC} slang for a full software distribution, as opposed to a patch or upgrade] A source software distribution that has been packaged in such a way that it can (theoretically) be unpacked and installed according to a series of steps using only standard Unix tools, and entirely documented by some reasonable chain of references from the top-level {README file}. The more general term {distribution} may imply that special tools or more stringent conditions on the host environment are required.

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# 5/18/2009 12:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

scary devil monastery

scary devil monastery

Anagram frequently used to refer to the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, which is populated with characters that rather justify the reference.

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# 5/17/2009 03:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

twink

Twink shirt Image by -nanio- via Flickr

twink:

  1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a clueless one.
  2. [UCSC] A {read-only user}. Also reported on the Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream `chick').
  3. On MU** systems that specialize in role-playing, refers to behavior of a (usually inexperienced) player that either ignores rules or social convention, or disrupts the natural flow of a scene to show off super powers.
    We are informed that in Indian country, the term twink generally refers to blondes into generic `Native American spirituality'. Signs include Indian jewelry with MADE IN THAILAND stamped on it, crystals, Clairol black hair, wearing swimsuits to powwows, Cherokee princess grandmas, a love of Dances with Wolves, and a fear of AIM and the NCAI. The twink nature is everywhere.
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# 5/16/2009 02:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

userland

A diagram showing the key Unix and Unix-like o... Image via Wikipedia

userland:

Anywhere outside the kernel. "That code belongs in userland." This term has been in common use among Unix kernel hackers since at least 1985, and may have have originated in that community. The earliest sighting was reported from the usenet group net.unix-wizards.
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# 5/16/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

ASCII art

ASCII art

The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly |, -, /, , and +). Also known as character graphics or ASCII graphics; see also {boxology}. Here is a serious example:

o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O L )||( | | | C U A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-//-+--o - T C N )||( | | | | P E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o U )||( | | | GND T o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+

A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor input filter circuit

And here are some very silly examples: |///| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___ | | o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ | | =(_)= THPHTH! / / / | (o)(o) U / C _) (__) /// _____ //// | ,___| (oo) / / | / /------- U (__) /____ || | /---V `v'- oo ) / ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/

//-o-\ ____---=======---____ ====___ /.. .. /___==== Klingons rule OK! // ---\__O__/--- \ \_ /_/

There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character names in the fashion of a rebus. +--------------------------------------------------------+ | ^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ | |^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ | | ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ | +--------------------------------------------------------+ " A Bee in the Carrot Patch "

Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in the examples above, here are three more:

(__) (__) (__) (/) ($$) (**) /-------/ /-------/ /-------/ / | 666 || / |=====|| / | || * ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----|| ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love

Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand: .-. /___ |___| |]_[| / I JL/ | JL .-. i () | () i .-. |_| .^. /_ LJ=======LJ /_ .^. |_| ._/___._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___._./___._._._ ., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., ., JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JL IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_ -------[]-------[]-------[_]----.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]- _/\_ ||\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\_I_//|| _/\_ || |__| ||=/_|_=|| |__|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|__| ||=/_|_=|| |__| ||- |__| |||__|__||| |__[___]__--__===__--__[___]__| |||__|__||| |__| ||| IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_] \_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]II/[]\_I/_/[]II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_] ./ .L_J/ L_J./ L_JI I[]/ []I IL_J .L_J/ L_J./ .L_J | |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J |_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J

The next step beyond static tableaux in ASCII art is ASCII animation. There are not many large examples of this; perhaps the best known is the ASCII animation of the original Star Wars movie at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/.

There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre; however, see also {warlording}.

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# 5/16/2009 06:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

ICBM address

ICBM address

(Also missile address) The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive Internet, included a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it became traditional to refer to this as one's ICBM address or missile address, and some people include it in their {sig block} with that name. (A real missile address would include target elevation.)

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# 5/15/2009 09:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

PHB

PHB

[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the {Dilbert} character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-{management} type. See also {pointy-haired}.

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# 5/15/2009 04:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

TANSTAAFL

TANSTAAFL

[acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the {signal-to-noise ratio} of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix B for discussion).

Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL ("There is No Such Thing...") is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.

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# 5/15/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

bandwidth

Partial map of the Internet based on the Janua... Image via Wikipedia

bandwidth:

  1. [common] Used by hackers (in a generalization of its technical meaning) as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics, but I missed some of the detail -- not enough bandwidth, I guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}; see also {brainwidth}. This generalized usage began to go mainstream after the Internet, population explosion of 1993-1994.
  2. Attention span.
  3. On {Usenet}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.
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# 5/15/2009 07:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

spoiler

The Spoilers (1930 film) Image via Wikipedia

spoiler

[Usenet]

  1. A remark which reveals important plot elements from books or movies, thus denying the reader (of the article) the proper suspense when reading the book or watching the movie.
  2. Any remark which telegraphs the solution of a problem or puzzle, thus denying the reader the pleasure of working out the correct answer (see also: interesting). Either sense readily forms compounds like total spoiler, quasi-spoiler and even pseudo-spoiler.

    By convention, articles which are spoilers in either sense should contain the word spoiler in the Subject: line, or guarantee via various tricks that the answer appears only after several screens-full of warning, or conceal the sensitive information via rot13, spoiler space, or some combination of these techniques.



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# 5/08/2009 01:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

OP

2003 MSR Netscan Usenet Treemap by number of P... Image by Marc_Smith via Flickr

OP

[Usenet; common] Abbreviation for "original poster", the originator of a particular thread.

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# 5/07/2009 09:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

life

life

  1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner (Scientific American, October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in {TECO}!). When a hacker mentions `life', he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. Many web resources are available starting from the Open Directory page of Life. The Life Lexicon is a good indicator of what makes the game so fascinating.

    [glider.png]

    A glider, possibly the best known of the quasi-organic phenomena in the Game of Life.

  2. The opposite of {Usenet}. As in "{Get a life!}"
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# 4/30/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

teergrube

teergrube

[German for tar pit] A trap set to punish spammers who use an {address harvester}; a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube's host in places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to embed the fake address in a Usenet, sig block next to a human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.


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# 4/25/2009 10:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

freeware

freeware

[common] Freely-redistributable software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users' groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, {Usenet}, or other electronic media. As the culture of the Internet has displaced the older BBS world, this term has lost ground to both {open source} and {free software}; it has increasingly tended to be restricted to software distributed in binary rather than source-code form. At one time, freeware was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See {shareware}, {FRS}.

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# 4/23/2009 11:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

mailbomb

mailbomb

(also mail bomb) [Usenet]

  1. v. To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts of {email} to a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or {spam} the recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense -- it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites.
  2. n. An automatic procedure with a similar effect.
  3. n. The mail sent. Compare {letterbomb}, {nastygram}, {BLOB} (sense 2), {list-bomb}.
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# 3/08/2009 01:31:00 AM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,

include

include

[Usenet]
  1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the discussion of inclusion styles under Hacker Writing Style.
  2. [from {C}] #include has appeared in {sig block}s to refer to a notional standard {disclaimer} file.

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# 2/19/2009 03:31:00 PM, Comentários, Links para esta postagem,