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Greatest Hackers in the Whole World

HACKER'S GLOSSARY

 

back door In the security of a system, a hole deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. May be intended for use by service technicians. Syn. trap door.
bit bucket The universal data sink. Discarded, lost or destroyed data is said to have gone to the bit bucket. Sometimes amplified as The Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
cracker  One who breaks security on a system. Coined by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of the term "hacker." The term "cracker" reflects a strong revulsion at the theft and vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. There is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than most would suspect.

Richard Stallman

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

John Draper

Mark Abene

Robert Morris

Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Poulsen

Johan Helsingius

Vladimir Levin

Douglas Engelbart

Steve Wozniak

Clifford Stoll

Linus Torvalds

Tsutomu Shimomura

News

Legendary computer hacker released from prison

Hacker discloses new Internet attack software

Nvidia settles Dutch hacking case

Hackers launch attacks to 'teach' RP a lesson

 

 

deep magic  An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one that could only have been composed by a true wizard. Many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics and artificial intelligence are deep magic.
foo 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files. ... etymology is obscure.
hacker n. 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. 2. One who programs enthusiastically. 3. A person who is good at programming quickly. 4. An expert at a particular program, as in 'a Unix hacker'. 5. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. The correct term for this sense is "cracker."
KISS Principle n. "Keep It Simple, Stupid." Often invoked when discussing design to fend off creeping featurism and control development complexity. Possibly related to the marketroid maxim, "Keep It Short and Simple."
kluge n. 1. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. 2. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particularly nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. 3. Something that works for the wrong reason.
lots of MIPS but no I/O adj. A person who is technically brilliant but who can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on input-output.
munge vt. 1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or whole program. 3. To modify data in some way that the speaker doesn't need to go into right now.
netiquette n. The conventions of politeness recognized on Usenet, such as avoidance of cross-pointing to inappropriate groups and refraining from commercial pluggery outside the biz groups.
phreaking 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks).
raster burn n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors.
RTFM imp. [Acronym for 'Read The F------ Manual.'] 1. Used by gurus to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. 2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just asking out of randomness: "Yes, I RTFM first."
security through obscurity (alt. security by obscurity) A hacker term for vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes -- namely, ignoring them; documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security algorithms; or trusting that nobody will find out about them, and that people who did find about them won't exploit them. This "strategy" never works for long.
sneaker n. An individual hired to break into places in order to test their security; analogous to "tiger team."