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 [cracker]s, 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.
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. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and [warez d00dz] usage:
- Misspell frequently. The substitutions
- phone => fone
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 bow 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!#!$#$!#!$").
- Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently.
- Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
- Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").
- TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.
These traits are similar to those of [B1FF], who originated as a parody of naive [BBS] users; also of his latter-day equivalent [Jeff K.]. Occasionally, this sort of distortion may be used as heavy sarcasm by a real hacker, as in:
> I got X Windows running under Linux!
d00d! u R an 31337 hax0r
The only practice resembling this in actual hacker usage is the substitution of a dollar sign of `s' in names of products or service felt to be excessively expensive, e.g. Compu$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].
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