Virtual Reality Zone/VRZONE.ISO/mac/TEXT/VRBOOK/CYBRTALK.TXT

Text File | 1994-10-09 | 18KB | 363 lines

Cyberspace, Cuberpunk, "The Cuckoo's Egg", Wizard, Hacker Ethic, Lord High
Fixer, Magic, Deep Magic, Black Art, Rain Dance, A Story about 'Magic', Voodoo
Programming, Wave a Dead Chicken, Virtual Reality -- as defined from various
Internet Sources...



CYBERSPACE

   /si:'ber-spays/ n

   1. Notional `information-space' loaded with visual cues and navigable
   with brain-computer interfaces called `cyberspace decks'; a
   characteristic prop of cyberpunk SF. At the time of this writing
   (mid-1991), serious efforts to construct virtual reality int rfaces
   modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are already under way,
   using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and b  ocular TV
   headsets. Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the possibility of
   a cyberspace someday evolving out of the network (see network, the)

   2. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in
   hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong eidetic imagery
   when in hack mode; interestingly, independent reports from multiple
   sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In
   particular, the dominant colors of this subjective `cyberspace' are
   often gray and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations

   Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier: Katie Hafner & John
   Markoff Simon & Schuster 1991 ISBN 0-671-68322-5

   This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious
   crackers into a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's
   dark side. The principals are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of
   the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert T. Morris (see RTM, sense 2) .
   Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their psychologies and motivations
   as on the details of their exploits, but don't slight the latter. The
   result is a balanced and fascinating account, particularly useful when
   read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. It is
   especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who blundered,
   with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated,
   drug-addled crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf
   between wizard and wannabee has seldom been made mor  obvious.


THE CUCKOO'S EGG


   Clifford Stoll Doubleday 1989 ISBN 0-385-24946-2

   Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the
   Chaos Club cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between
   `hacker' and `cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha,
   and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously
   vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live
   and how they think.


CYBERPUNK

   Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier: Katie Hafner & John
   Markoff Simon & Schuster 1991 ISBN 0-671-68322-5

   This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious
   crackers into a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's
   dark side. The principals are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of
   the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert T. Morris (see RTM, sense 2) .
   Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their psychologies and motivations
   as on the details of their exploits, but don't slight the latter. The
   result is a balanced and fascinating account, particularly useful when
   read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. It is
   especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who blundered,
   with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated,
   drug-addled crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf
   between wizard and wannabee has seldom been made more obvious.

WIZARD

   n

   1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware
   works (that is, who groks it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs
   qui  ly in an emergency. Someone is a hacker if he or she has general
   hacking ability, but is a wizard with respect to something only if he
   or she has specific detaile  knowledge of that thing. A good hacker
   could become a wizard for something given the time to study it

   2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary
   people; one who has wheel privileges on a system

   3. A UNIX expert, esp. a UNIX systems programmer. This usage is well
   enough established that `UNIX Wizard' is a recognized job title at
   some corporations and to most headhunters. See guru, lord high fixer.
   See also deep magic, heavy wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain
   dance, voodoo programming, wave a dead chicken.


   [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] enjoys exploring the
   details of programmable systems
   and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who
   prefer to learn only the minimum necessary

   2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys
   programming rather than just theorizing about programming

   3    capable of appreciating hack value

   4. A person who is good at programming quickly

   5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work
   using it or on it; as in `a UNIX hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are
   correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or
   enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example
   One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming
   or circumventing limitations

   8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive
   information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network
   hacker'. The correct term is cracker.

   The term `hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global
   community defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address).
   It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some
   version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic, the.

   It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe
   oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a
   meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are
   gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in
   identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are
   not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee.

HACKER ETHIC,THE

   n

   1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good,
   and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by
   writing free software and facilitating access to information and to
   computing resources wherever possible

   2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is
   ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or
   breach of confidentiality. Both of these normative ethical principles
   are widely, but by no means universally, accepted among hackers. Most
   hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it
   by writing and giving away free software. A few go further and assert
   that *all* information should be free and *any* proprietary control of
   it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU project.

   Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of
   cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the
   belief that `ethical' cracking excludes destruction at least moderates
   the behavior of people who see themselves as `benign' crackers (see
   also samurai). On this view, it may be one of the highest forms of
   hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to
   the sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how
   it was done and how the hole can be plugged --- acting as an unpaid
   (and unsolicited) tiger team.

   The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic
   is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical
   tricks, software, and (where possible) computing resources with other
   hackers. Huge cooperative networks such as USENET, FidoNet and
   Internet (see Internet address) can function without central control
   because of this trait; they both rely on and reinforce a sense of
   community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible asset.


          hacker
   7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming
   or circumventing limitations

   8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive
   information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network
   hacker'. The correct term is cracker.

   The term `hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global
   community defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address).
   It also implies that the person described is seen to subscribe to some
   version of the hacker ethic (see hacker ethic, the.

   It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe
   oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a
   meritocracy based on ability), though one to which new members are
   gladly welcome. There is thus a certain ego satisfaction to be had in
   identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are
   not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus). See also wannabee.


LORD HIGH FIXER

   [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner']
   n. The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect
   of a system. See wizard.


DEEP MAGIC

   [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. An awesomely arcane
   technique central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally
   published nor available to hackers at large (compare black art); one
   that could only have been composed by a true wizard. Compiler
   optimization techniques and many aspects of OS design used to be deep
   magic; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics,
   and AI still are. Compare heavy wizardry. Esp. found in comments of
   the form "Deep magic begins here...". Compar  voodoo programming.

BLACK ART

   n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly
   ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems
   area (compare black magic). VLSI design and compiler code optimization
   were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art;
   as theory developed they became deep magic, and once standard
   textbooks had been written, became merely heavy wizardry. The huge
   proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new
   computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made
   both the term `black art' and what it describes less common than
   formerly. See also voodoo programming.

MAGIC

   adj

   As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare
   automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently
   advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is
   controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically
   computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions

   2. Characteristic of something that works although no one really
   understands  hy (this is especially called black magic)

   3. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something
   otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now
   unveiled. Compare black magic, wizardly, deep magic, heavy wizardry.

   For more about hackish `magic', see A Story Abut `Magic' (in Appendix
   A).

A STORY ABOUT `MAGIC'

   (by GLS) ================================

   Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the
   MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of
   one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the
   lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

   You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what
   it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled
   in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil
   on the metal switch body were the words `magic' and `more magic'. The
   switch was in the `more magic' position.

   I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the
   switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had
   only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear
   into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of
   electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires
   connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no
   wire on its other side.

   It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke.
   Convinced by our re  oning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped
   it. The computer instantly crashed.

   Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but
   nevertheless restored the switch to the `more magic' position before
   reviving the computer.

   A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I
   recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a
   supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I
   was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him
   the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire
   connected to it, still in the `more magic' position. We scrutinized
   the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of
   the wire, though connected t wiring, was connected to a
   ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was
   it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a plac  that
   couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

   The computer promptly crashed.

   This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who
   was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He
   inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and
   diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever
   since.

   We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a
   theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and
   flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset
   the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll
   never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was
   magic.

   I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I
   usually keep it set on `more magic'.


VOODOO PROGRAMMING

   [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n. The use by guess or
   cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one
   does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may
   not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost
   synonymous with black magic, except that black magic typically isn't
   documented and *nobody* understands it. Compare magic, deep magic,
   heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead
   chicken.

WAVE A DEAD CHICKEN

   v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software
   hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary
   so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has
   been expended. "I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I
   really think we've run into an OS bug." Compare voodoo programming,
   rain dance.


RAIN DANCE

   n

   1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, with the
   expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies
   to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. "I
   can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain
   dance

   2. Any arcane sequence of actions performed with computers or software
   in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to
   rituals that include both an incantation or two and physical activity
   or motion. Compare magic, voodoo programming, black art, cargo cult
   programming, wave a dead chicken.

VIRTUAL REALITY

   n

   1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the
   Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See
   cyberspace

   2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing
   games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true
   confessions' magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as USENET's
   alt.callahans newsgroup or the MUD experiments on Internet),
   interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel
   complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be personae
   utterly unlike the people who write them, and common `background
   characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you
   may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent
   of the person who `owns' it. Otherwise anything goes. See bamf,
   cyberspace.


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