Talking the Talk:Excerpts from the Jargon File
...s a label that should be bestowed by others rather than self-assumed. Cracker – One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of hacker (q.v., sense 8). Suit – 2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. Luser – A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Bug – An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction." This entry relates a favorite story in the geek culture about a technician pulling a moth out of a Harvard Mark II, and logging the fix as "First actual case of bug being found. Easter egg – 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command make love with not war? Honey Pot – 1. A box designed to attract crackers so that they can be observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different machine). Different from an iron box in that its purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive network security tactic — you set up an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick & Bellovin's book Firewalls and Internet Security. Baggy Pantsing – [Georgia Tech] A “baggy pantsing” is used to reprimand hackers who incautiously leave their terminals unlocked. The affected user will come back to find a post from them on internal newsgroups discussing exactly how baggy their pants are, an accepted stand-in for “inattentive user who left their work unprotected in the clusters”. A properly done baggy pantsing is highly mocking and humorous. Ninety-Ninety Rule - “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs, and popularized by Jon Bentley's September 1985 Bumper-Sticker Computer Scien...