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You should have a look at the Jargon Dictionary. It explains some of the widely used acros, at least those from the IT sector.
A copy can be found at http://www.netmeg.net/jargon.

I've also got a collection of reviews about spam filters, Procmail filtering advice, and Windows anti-spam software.

I peronsally see this article as proof of what Katz is trying to say, that the social graces of the "normal world" do not seem to exist in the techno-culture.

Bingo! That's because techno-culture isn't the normal world - you're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I got a kick in the ass from the "normal world" when I was 5 or so and realized that 95% of the people on this planet don't give two shits about learning anything. The sheer time investment it has taken me to get where I am - the thousands and thousands of hours in front of computers and reading books in my early teens will of course affect how I percieve the world and the culture I live in. There's lots of other people who feel the same, and I suspect for similar reasons.

What Katz is trying to do is make it seem like the techno-culture needs to encompass the slack-asses of the world. I respect intelligence and skill - at something. If you haven't got either, I'm not going to respect you. That's just the way it goes in my world.

One of the things I believe is that everyone has something they're good at, and they should do that, or they're not going to be happy. Spend your time doing something you like, work to be the best at it, and you'll get respect from the "techno-culture" because they respect that. Nothing pisses me off more than the sterotypical blonde bimbette without two clues in her head. Or, not to be sexist, Rocco, her male counterpart. Not to whore for karma, but I suggest Katz, you, and anyone else having difficulty read A Portrait of J. Random Hacker.

Isn't this a little harsh? The natural gift of intelligence is scarcly different than the gift of athleticism or being attractive.

Oh, the irony. I didn't see any of the "beautiful people" sharing their social networks - I still don't. Do what you like and do it well. I could be a lot more harsh - harsh was public school - but I've mellowed in my old age.

Have you read my Bio ?

I think you should be doing the reading here.
You could start with this, this, and this.

thank you,

++tlt

People keep asking, so I'll just post it. From the name page:

The Ogg project began with a few-weekend-attempt at a simple audio compression package as part of a larger project in 1993. At the time, the software was called 'Squish'. The project and the general problem of music compression became a personal fascination, and Squish took on a life of its own far beyond the proportions of the original digital music studio project of which it was to be part.

A few months after the first Squish webpage, I received a polite but firm letter informing me that Squish is a registered trademark (for a mail transport system). Mike Whitson, a contributor to the cause in the early days, suggested the name 'OggSquish' as a replacement.

An 'Ogg' is a tactical maneuver from the network game 'Netrek' that has entered common usage in a wider sense. From the definition:

3. To do anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow." "Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."

(see the rest of the definition for the original Netrek usage.)

At the time Ogg was starting out, most personal computers were i386s and the i486 was new. I remember thinking about the algorithms I was considering, "Woah, that's heavyweight. People are going to need a 486 to run that..." While the software ogged the music, there wasn't much processor left for anything else.

These days, Ogg is a larger multimedia project that does not only concern compression; Squish became the name of one of the Ogg codecs. For that reason, we usually just refer to it as Ogg when there's no Netrek context nearby. The Ogg project has nothing to do with the common surname 'Ogg'. Nor is it named after 'Nanny Ogg' from the Terry Pratchett book _Wyrd Sisters_.

The 'Thor-and-the-Snake' logo is drawn somewhat from Norse mythology; the real symbolism is the sine-curve shape of the snake. Thor is hefting Mjollnir about to compress the periodic signal Jörmungandr... See, it all makes sense.

Vorbis, on the other hand is named after the Terry Pratchett character from the book _Small Gods_. The name holds some significance, but it's an indirect, uninteresting story.

For some more information on the "jaggies" (the stuff that makes things look bad, that this technologies aimes at improving in fonts) in OpenGL and OS/2 check out:


http://www.edm2.com/0603/opengl.html

• The original proposal intended to use UNIX for what is now called office automation..

You don't know what you are talking about. The original UNIX was done by Ken Thompson in an abandoned PDP-7 in a closet. There's a story going around that people thought he was a janitor who worked out of that closet. There was no original proposal at all.

• The chess program was text based, not a video game.

Belle, the Chess program, came years later. I'm referring to Spacewar. Read this.

-Jordan Henderson

Crovax,
Since when were you to dictate who belongs? Or who's intelligent for that matter? Not only is intelligence such a subjective term that I do not even want to touch. Thank god I graduated. How did you get to be a sysadmin? You can't even boot a linux box last I checked (or your dad won't let you, as you put it) You sure sound arrogant. Of course maybe you are just lying to yourself, as some are prone to doing. Read The New Hacker's Dictionary / A Portrait of J. Random Hacker at for a clearer common definition of the hacker culture your are trying to place yourself in.
JR / Neophile

I'm a bit skeptical about this backdoor possibility in official versions of the kernel (or gcc or some other important piece of free s/w). People have been suggesting it for years, but it's never actually happened.

Never actually happened, eh? Taken from the Jargon Dictionary entry for Back Door:

Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the `login' command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled `login' the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources.

Interesting.....I don't suppose this could be a veiled reference to what geeks love to do best, i.e. spend their time CODING? If you don't understand the hacker ethic, I suggest you spend some quality time reading the Jargon file available here, especially that section on the profile of the typical hacker.

Note, I am not commenting on the content of the article, but on your blithe ignorance of certain established patterns. I especially love that line about "Stinking like a corpse". While I'm all for personal hygene, if a person has just finished a hacking run, I wouldn't complain terribly if they were a little wiff. And if your ultra-conservative olefactory organs can't deal with that....that's your problem.

As far as your point about this country getting "flushed down the toilet"...That actually is well taken. Many of the majors produced now days do, in fact, reflect the intellectual malaise that "only the genius possess and the insane lament". And underwater basketweaving may soon be an actual major, given the trends. That's all well and good. But unless I am misunderstanding the article, this program would basically train people how to make games - a combination of grafics design (that's where Alias/Wavefront comes in) and programming. It's perhaps not as academically rigorous as pure programming, but I can see it's legitimacy. Why did this particular major set you off? It seems, as far as weird majors go, it's fairly tame compared to some of the other stuff out there.

I am all for ranting...but it should be done under the appropriate topic. If you feel like decrying the state of modern decay, post under the latest article about MPAA, Echelon, or Microsoft patenting the bicycle.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
-LL

According to this entry in the Jargon file, daemon is derived from the "attendant power or spirit" meaning, but was later rationalized as Disk And Execution MONitor.

See the entry in the Jargon Dictionary for the complete description.

There is a term for this it's called Godwin's Law
The title length limitation on this site is severe!

• Getting Apollo 13 back home.
• SR-71 (the pointy thing in the middle of each engine extends or retracts to keep the shockwave aligned with the edge of the intake, using the shockwave as a first-stage compressor... And that's just one of many hacks involved in that plane)
• Mars Pathfinder (already mentioned)
• Duff's Device
• The cooling system for the Cray-2
• Putting a refrigerator in a computer case to allow you to overclock a chip to 1GHz
• Beer!
• Superglue(tm) as a suture device
• QWERTY keyboard layout

If we don't restrict ourselves to human-created hacks, how about the development cycle of human infants? We are born incrediably small to avoid killing the mother, and have ~18 years of physical development ahead of us.

Godwin's Law states that as a Usenet discussion continues, the probability that Nazism will be mentioned approaches one.

This was intended as a good-natured way of saying that a conversation has probably lived out its useful life by that point, although people have twisted it around ever since to make it say that mentioning Nazism automatically ends a discussion.

As if such a thing were possible....

http://www.netmeg.net/jargon/terms/g/godwin_s_la w.html, among others.

--

In the article, Jane's discounts the benefits of state sponsorship to cyberterrorism, since tools are commonly available. This is misguided.

Most of the recorded cyberterrorist attacks have been either defacement of a website, or crashing a system on the internet. I would call this the "car bomb" level of cyberterrorism. It causes a little mayhem, gets a little publicity, but doesn't make a big wave in the scheme of things.

A cyberterrorist can do a lot more with a full scale infiltration of a key system. Assuming social engineering doesn't work to get sufficient access, crypto might be required to ensure access. That requires a lot of CPU time, something a terrorist organization won't have without help from the big boys.

Lastly, if the goal of a cyberterrorist is to disrupt electronic systems, there's nothing that does it better than an EMP. "EMP Guns", that is a portable device that can produce a localized or directed EMP without human or property damage, are a persistant urban legend that clearly has some kernel in fact. With over the counter hardware, you can build a HERF gun able to produce a trivial EMP. Is it that far fetched to think that the big governments have the technology to do better than that, considering they've been researching EMP for the past three decades? One could possibly find its way into the hands of terrorists. The midwest millitias seem to be very proficient at obtaining US military hardware.

Regardless, it's not an urban myth that an airburst nuclear weapon can produce a substantial EMP with little human or property damage. In fact, here's some congressional testimony detailing this. The biggest problem facing a terrorist who wants a nuclear weapon isn't figuring out how to build it, it's obtaining the fissionable material. Here again, government sponsorship of a terrorist organization could become key. China has shown itself very willing to supply governments that might sponsor terrorists with nuclear materials.

A terrorist with a nuclear weapon might well decide that a country-wide EMP would be a better use of it than blowing up a piece of a city. It would be easy to implement too, just place the weapon on an airplane and time it properly.

In all, cyberterrorism is in its infancy, and in order to determine an appropriate response to or defence against it, you need to look at what's possible, and not what happened so far.

It's also worth noting that the FBI's requests for additional computer tapping rights and restrictions on encryption "to protect against terrorism" would not do anything against such a terrorist. Any computer savvy terrorist will use strong encryption (easily available on foreign websites), and communicate on a server that is in a country where the US would have enforcement problems. The FBI's requests do not defend against either of these.

----

At what point am I going to stop just reading about the culture and the people (else) and all the neat toys and actually become a geek myself? This sort of work depresses me in a big way - I have nothing to show for all the effort I put into learning the systems and languages. Sure, I'm only 2nd year university, and I never even thought much about writing software before last year (except in vague fantasies)!
At the same time, though, I think reading things like this extensively before even starting any of my planned projects (and I've been planning and planning!) will ultimately help me do the right thing in all the things I do.
One can hope, anyway!

*N

Now look what you've done.
You've spawned a definition of foobar which is different from other foobars. From now on web searchers will be distracted from their search for the common ancestor of foobar by finding this foobar discussion. And now that you've created this foobar meaning, all other foobars will vanish.

For all you kiddies out there, here is the jargon file.

Why do I get the impression that this story was done by the same people in the previous article?

Posted by bSMfh (bastard ScoutMaster fro:

Doh!
someone groped my wife's packets!
ping origins