While travelling on business recently, I was seated in the “Club America” lounge in Miami International Airport. Since I was interested in connecting to the net in order to send some e-mail and update my RSS reader prior to a long flight, I popped up my AirPort™ menu (That’s Apple’sAirPort, not the FAA’s. ) And noticed that the local wireless had been, well, h4x0r3d.
I’m not completely up to speed on what it means to be:
b4rc0d3 pawnd j00!
… but I’m sure I can ask any Script-Kiddie for help interpreting.
4 comments
Adam Roach says:
2005.02.24 at 16:08 (UTC -7 )
b4rc0d3 = “barcode” (presumably his hacker handle)
pawned = “owned”
j00 = “you”
Some claim of having gained unwanteed access to your machine. Usually “owning” involves having complete (root or root-like) access, but is often claimed in circumstances of far less than complete success.
Alan says:
2005.02.24 at 21:38 (UTC -7 )
Hmm so does that make Adam a Script Kiddie™?
Thankfully this wasn’t one of *my* boxes, but something belonging to either American Airlines or potentially the Miami Airport Authority.
Adam Roach says:
2005.02.26 at 22:00 (UTC -7 )
Heh.
I’ve watched the evolution of the hacker style of typing since the ’80′s, and it fascinates me from an anthropological perspective. Even as early as the mid-80s, you saw some straightforward substitutions (e.g. “ph” for words typically spelled with “f”, “z” instead of “s”) spread across BBSes; this led to the coinage of such words as “philes” (no longer as popular as it once was) and “warez”. The rise in popularity of Usenet provided a better connected pool of communication for meme distribution, leading to additional rather straightforward substitutions (e.g. zero for the letter O) that didn’t impede readability as much as give insight into the mentality of the person at the keyboard. Coinciding roughly with AOL’s usenet gateway coming online in 1993, we started seeing an increase in the use of odd terms and phrases, as well as a fairly consistent use of certain typos and misspellings. For example, the use of numbers for the symbols above them (i.e. “1″ instead of “!”) became popular to the point that the use had obviously become intentional instead of accidental. Similar observations can be made around that period for common letter transpositions (“teh”). Finally, the use of strictly phonetic spellings for certain types of words became popular (e.g. “leet” for “elite”), probably out of a combination of poor spelling skills and an attempt to look “cool.”
Sometime around 2000, two of these trends sort of mutated into a more aggressive form: in particular, the use of numbers for letters that they only vaguely represented (e.g. “3″ for “E”, “4″ for “A”, “7″ for “T”, etc) accelerated, as did the embracing of typos — both transpositions and “finger slips.” Thus, you end up with terms such as “pr0n” and “pwned” (“p” is next to “o” on the keyboard). Occasionally, one of these typoed forms will mutate further to a more pronouncable form; you provide one such example, demonstrating that “pwned” has evolved into “pawned” in certain circles.
The end result, of course, is a set of typographical conventions which render text almost unreadable; however, the terms are still largely English. There are some notable exceptions, such as the use of “haxored” and variations on that theme, but the origins of such words are obvious enough that they are at best a dialect and not a distinct language. The readability aspect, though, provides a much-embraced barrier to entry to the community, and a certain level of opaqueness to those not steeped in the culture. In my mind, the current incarnation of the hacker vernacular (or “1337 5p33k,” if you will) bears a strong resemblance to the highly stylized gang grafitti “tags” that street gangs use to mark territory.
And now, with the nice combination of the phrases “pr0n,” “h4x0r3d,” and “warez” on this page, I predict a surge in traffic with google as the referer. Check your logs in a few weeks.
(As a bizarre aside, I’ll note that there actually is a webserver at “http://www.g00g1e.com/”, but it doesn’t appear to be useful at the moment.)
Adam Roach says:
2005.02.26 at 22:06 (UTC -7 )
I forgot to mention one of the factors that probably played a strong role in the rise of number substitutions: the rise in popularity of IRC. One common form of antagonism was (and I presume still is) to take a nickname that visually resembles that of someone else and begin impersonating them. So, for example, if you wanted to impersonate someone named “Incubus,” you could take a name of “1ncubus,” and make a running start at pretending to be them. The same would go for choosing a nick of “f1yboy” to antagonize “flyboy.” You get the general idea.
Although I’m not 100% certain, it seems quite likely that these techniques played a role in the rise of letter substitutions in IRC and other fora.