Chapter 9. Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers
From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom.
The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of ‘pirate
boards’ inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and
warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running
IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic
jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
While BBS technology essentially died out after the
Great Internet Explosion, the cracker culture
moved to IRC and other Internet-based network channels and maintained a
semi-underground existence.
Though crackers often call themselves ‘hackers’, they aren't
(they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet
expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their
vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's, and hackers regard them with
varying degrees of contempt. But ten years on the brightest crackers tend to
become hackers, and sometimes to recall their origins by using cracker slang
in a marked and heavily ironic way.
This lexicon covers much of cracker slang (which is often called
“leet-speak”) so the reader will be able to understand both what
leaks out of the cracker underground and the occasional ironic use by
hackers.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz
usage:
Misspell frequently. The substitutions phone → fone and
freak → phreak are obligatory.
Always substitute ‘z’s for ‘s’s.
(i.e. “codes” → “codez”). The substitution of
‘z’ for ‘s’ has evolved so that a ‘z’ is
now systematically put at the end of words to denote an illegal or cracking
connection. Examples : Appz, passwordz, passez, utilz, MP3z, distroz, pornz,
sitez, gamez, crackz, serialz, downloadz, FTPz, etc.
Type random emphasis characters after a post line
(i.e. “Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$”).
Use the emphatic ‘k’ prefix
(“k-kool”, “k-rad”, “k-awesome”)
frequently.
Abbreviate compulsively (“I got lotsa warez w/
docs”).
TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.
The following letter substitutions are common:
a → 4
e → 3
f → ph
i → 1 or |
l → | or 1
m → |\/|
n → |\|
o → 0
s → 5
t → 7 or +
Thus, “elite” comes out “31337” and “all
your base are belong to us” becomes “4ll y0ur b4s3 4r3 b3l0ng t0
us”, Other less common substitutions include:
b → 8
c → ( or k or |< or /<
d → <|
g → 6 or 9
h → |-|
k → |< or /<
p → |2
u → |_|
v → / or \/
w → // or \/\/
x → ><
y → '/
The word “cool” is spelled “kewl” and normally
used ironically; when crackers really want to praise something they use the
prefix “uber” (from German) which comes out “ub3r”
or even “|_|83r”
These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who
originated as a parody of naive BBS users; also of his
latter-day equivalent Jeff K.. Occasionally, this sort
of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm or ironically by a real hacker, as
in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!
d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
|
The words “hax0r” for “hacker” and
“sux0r” for “sucks” are the most common references;
more generally, to mark a term as cracker-speak one may add “0r”
or “xor”. Examples:
“The nightly build is sux0r today.”
“Gotta go reboot those b0x0rz.”
“Man, I really ought to fix0r my .fetchmailrc.”
“Yeah, well he's a 'leet VMS operat0r now, so he's too good for us.”
The only practice resembling this in native hacker usage is the
substitution of a dollar sign of ‘s’ in names of products or
service felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$erve, Micro$oft.
For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see
lamer, elite,
leech, poser,
cracker, and especially
warez d00dz, banner site,
ratio site, leech mode.
