Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing 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.

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").

* 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. 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 '1337 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.

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