Our favorite hacker slang

(Image credit: (REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov))

last updated 8 January 2015

1. bikeshedding

Bikeshedding refers to the "futile investment of time and energy in marginal technical issues," and "implies technical disputes over minor, marginal issues conducted while more serious ones are being overlooked." The term originated in Berkeley Software Distribution culture and is an example of Parkinson's law of triviality, a 1957 argument from British historian C. Northcote Parkinson which says that "organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues." The term bikeshedding comes from the idea of "people arguing over what color to paint the bicycle shed while the house is not finished."

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A black hat is "a malicious hacker who commits illegal acts." The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites the phrase's earliest usage as 1990: "The idea of the 'pick one from three' is so the black hats can't tell which challenge you're responding to, and thus can't build a table from observation." Black hat hacker comes from an earlier meaning of black hat, "a villain or bad guy in a story, especially in a Western," which the OED says is from the late 1950s: "Once it was easy to tell the heroes from the villains in the television Westerns: The white hats were the good guys and the black hats were the bad guys." By that token, a white hat is "a well-meaning hacker who hacks for a good cause or to aid a company, organization, or government without causing harm."

Dogfooding, or eating your own dog food, is when a company uses "its own product to demonstrate the quality and capabilities of the product." The origin has a couple of possibilities: 1980s Alpo dog food commercials in which spokesman Lorne Greene claimed that he fed Alpo to his own dogs, and the story of the president of Kal Kan Pet Food supposedly eating a can of his dog food at shareholders' meeting.

Doxing, or sometimes doxxing, refers to publishing "an individual's personal information on the internet," often "outing" the person from a pseudonymous persona. Dox comes from documents since personal documents, such as credit card statements, are often used to obtain the target's real identity. In her post on doxing back in February, Nancy Friedman wrote that according to Know Your Meme, the term has been in use since the early to mid-2000s. A recent, and controversial, example of doxing was the unmasking of Violentacrez, a notorious Reddit troll.

The computer sense of hacker originated in the mid-1970s, says the OED, with the meanings of "a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself" and "a person who uses his skill with computers to try to gain unauthorized access to computer files or networks." According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the usage may have evolved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where by the late 1960s a hack had the general sense of a "creative prank." This sense of hack may somehow be related to the "writing for hire" meaning of the word, or else the physical act of chopping or cutting. The term hacktivist, a blend of hack and activist, originated in the mid-1990s, says the OED.

A heisenbug is "a software bug which fails to manifest itself during debugging." The word is a play on Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist who devised the uncertainty principle, which states "that any attempt to measure the position of a subatomic particle will disrupt its movement, making it harder to predict." Heisenbug seems to have originated in the mid-1980s. Heisenberg is also the pseudonym of chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, Walter White, in the television show, Breaking Bad. The behavior of Walter White, aka Heisenberg, could be likened to both the subatomic particle in the uncertainty principle and the elusive heisenbug.

Munge, also mung, refers to transforming "data in an undefined or unexplained manner"; adding a spamblock; or corrupting "a record about an individual by erroneously merging in information about another individual." One theory of this word's origin is that it was "coined in 1958 in the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology," with the backronym "Mash Until No Good" created in 1960. However, the word munge has been in use since 1600, according to the OED, when it meant to wipe someone's nose or to cheat someone. In 1770, it came to mean "to eat greedily and noisily; to much; to chew," which could easily be extended to the idea data being chewed up. In 1790, munge gained the meaning of "to mutter, grumble; to mope."

A smurf attack, according to Technopedia, is "a type of denial of service attack in which a system is flooded with spoofed ping messages." The attack "creates high computer network traffic on the victim's network, which often renders it unresponsive." The term seems to come from the online gaming world, in which smurfing refers to an experienced player creating "a new account for the purposes of being matched against inexperienced players for easy wins." Smurfing, which could be considered a type of hustling, seems to have originated in the mid-1990s in the game Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, in which "certain well-known players," using names such as PapaSmurf and Smurfette, pretended to play badly only to eventually beat the other players. A variation of the smurf attack is the fraggle attack, named for its sourcecode, Fraggle.c. The name may come from Fraggle Rock, a Jim Henson show from the mid-1980s, or the word frag, which means "to wound or kill (a fellow soldier) by throwing a grenade or similar explosive at the victim," and "a successful kill in a deathmatch game." Frag is short for fragmentation grenade. The word smurf, in case you were wondering, comes from De Smurfen, the Dutch translation of the Belgian Les Schtroumpfs, a word invented by Smurfs creator Peyo when he couldn't remember the word for salt.

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