Chapter 52

[Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] 1. A system failure. When a user's process bombed, the operator would get the message "Help, Help, Snark in MTS!" 2. More generally, any kind of unexplained or threatening event on a computer (especially if it might be a boojum). Often used to refer to an event or a log file entry that might indicate an attempted security violation. See snivitz. 3. UUCP name of _snark.thyrsus.com_, home site of the Jargon File versions from 2.*.* on (i.e., this lexicon).

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sneaker n.

An individual hired to break into places in order to test their security; analogous to tiger team. Compare samurai.

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sneakernet /snee'ker-net/ n.

Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called `Tennis-Net', `Armpit-Net', `Floppy-Net' or `Shoenet'; in the 1990s, `Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.

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sniff v.,n.

1. To watch IP packets traversing a local network. Most often in the phrase `packet sniffer', a program for doing same. 2.Synonym for poll.

Node:snivitz, Next:'Snooze, Previous:sniff, Up:= S =

snivitz /sniv'itz/ n.

A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than a snark). Compare glitch.

Node:'Snooze, Next:SO, Previous:snivitz, Up:= S =

'Snooze /snooz/ [FidoNet] n.

Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicit flamage in subsequent issues.

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SO /S-O/ n.

1. (also `S.O.') Abbrev. for Significant Other, almost invariably written abbreviated and pronounced /S-O/ by hackers. Used to refer to one's primary relationship, esp. a live-in to whom one is not married. See MOTAS, MOTOS, MOTSS. 2. [techspeak] The Shift Out control character in ASCII (Control-N, 0001110).

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social engineering n.

Term used among crackers and samurai for cracking techniques that rely on weaknesses in wetware rather than software; the aim is to trick people into revealing passwords or other information that compromises a target system's security. Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow employee with an urgent access problem. See also the tiger team story in the patch entry.

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social science number n. //

[IBM] A statistic that is content-free, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. As a rule, management loves them. See also numbers, math-out, pretty pictures.

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sock puppet n.

[Usenet: from the act of placing a sock over your hand and talking to it and pretending it's talking back] In Usenet parlance, a pseudo through which the puppeteer posts follow-ups to their own original message to give the appearance that a number of people support the views held in the original message.

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sodium substrate n.

Syn salt substrate.

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soft boot n.

See boot.

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softcopy /soft'kop-ee/ n.

[by analogy with `hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See bits, machinable.

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software bloat n.

The results of second-system effect or creeping featuritis. Commonly cited examples include ls(1), X, BSD, Missed'em-five, and OS/2.

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software hoarding n.

Pejorative term employed by members and adherents of the GNU project to describe the act of holding software proprietary, keeping it under trade secret or license terms which prohibit free redistribution and modification. Used primarily in Free Software Foundation propaganda. For a summary of related issues, see GNU.

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software laser n.

An optical laser works by bouncing photons back and forth between two mirrors, one totally reflective and one partially reflective. If the lasing material (usually a crystal) has the right properties, photons scattering off the atoms in the crystal will excite cascades of more photons, all in lockstep. Eventually the beam will escape through the partially-reflective mirror. One kind of sorcerer's apprentice mode involving bounce messages can produce closely analogous results, with a cascade of messages escaping to flood nearby systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized incidents of this kind.

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software rot n.

Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to lose; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to bit rot. More commonly, `software rot' strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently robust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. Syn. `code rot'. See also link rot.

For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, a good number of them succumbed to software rot when their 2-digit year counters underwent wrap around at the beginning of the year 2000. Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's license renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished.

Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than the mythical one was a real problem on early research computers (e.g., the R1; see grind crank). If a program that depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. We can snarf this opcode, right? No one uses it.")

Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected appropriately.

Compare bit rot.

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softwarily /soft-weir'i-lee/ adv.

In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective **`softwary' is not used. See hardwarily.

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softy n.

[IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.

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some random X adj.

Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See also J. Random.

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sorcerer's apprentice mode n.

[from Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" via Paul Dukas's "L'apprenti sorcier" the film "Fantasia"] A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of such behavior caused by bounce message loops in email software. Compare broadcast storm, network meltdown, software laser, ARMM.

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SOS /S-O-S/

n.,obs. An infamously losing text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a quick-and-dirty `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed).

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source n.

[very common] In reference to software, `source' is invariably shorthand for `source code', the preferred human-readable and human-modifiable form of the program. This is as opposed to object code, the derived binary executable form of a program. This shorthand readily takes derivative forms; one may speak of "the sources of a system" or of "having source".

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source of all good bits n.

A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a guru might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary.

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space-cadet keyboard n.

A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of EMACS. It was equipped with no fewer than seven shift keys: four keys for bucky bits (`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For example, the `L' key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an appropriate `chord' with the left hand on the shift keys, you could get the following results:

L

lowercase l

shift-L

uppercase L

front-L

lowercase lambda

front-shift-L

uppercase lambda

top-L

two-way arrow (front and shift are ignored)

And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to operate. See bucky bits, cokebottle, double bucky, meta bit, quadruple bucky.

Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the space-cadet keyboard with the `Knight keyboard'. Though both were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as described under bucky bits). The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the first Knight keyboard.

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spaceship operator n.

The glyph <=>, so-called apparently because in the low-resolution constant-width font used on many terminals it vaguely resembles a flying saucer. Perl uses this to denote the signum-of-difference operation.

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SPACEWAR n.

A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962. In 1968-69, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became Unix. Less than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still feeping in video arcades everywhere.

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spaghetti code n.

Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code has so many jumps in it.

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spaghetti inheritance n.

[encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with spaghetti code.

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spam vt.,vi.,n.

[from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"] 1. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also buffer overflow, overrun screw, smash the stack. 2. To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as one well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking "What do you think of abortion?" on _soc.women_). This is often done with cross-posting (e.g. any message which is crossposted to _alt.rush-limbaugh_ and _alt.politics.homosexuality_ will almost inevitably spam both groups). This overlaps with troll behavior; the latter more specific term has become more common. 3. To send many identical or nearly-identical messages separately to a large number of Usenet newsgroups. This is more specifically called `ECP', Excessive Cross-Posting. This is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the Net. See also velveeta and jello. 4. To bombard a newsgroup with multiple copies of a message. This is more specifically called `EMP', Excessive Multi-Posting. 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients. Synonyms include UCE, UBE. 6. Any large, annoying, quantity of output. For instance, someone on IRC who walks away from their screen and comes back to find 200 lines of text might say "Oh no, spam".

The later definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to most people senses 3 4 and 5 are now primary. All three behaviors are considered abuse of the net, and are almost universally grounds for termination of the originator's email account or network connection. In these senses the term `spam' has gone mainstream, though without its original sense or folkloric freight - there is apparently a widespread myth among lusers that "spamming" is what happens when you dump cans of Spam into a revolving fan.

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spam bait n.

Email addresses included in, or comprising the entirety of, a usenet message so that spammers mining a newsgroup with an address harvester will collect them. These addresses can be people who have offended or annoyed the poster, or who are included so that a spammer will spam an official, thereby causing himself trouble. One particularly effective form of spam bait is the address of a teergrube.

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spamblock /spam'blok/ n.

[poss. by analogy to sunblock] Text inserted in an email address to render it invalid and thus useless to spammers. For example, the address `[email protected]' might be transformed to `[email protected]'. Adding spamblock to an address is often referred to as `munging' it (see munge)-. This evasion tactic depends on the fact that most spammers collect names with some sort of address harvester on volumes too high to de-mung by hand, but individual humans reading an email message can readily spot and remove a spamblock in the from address.

Note: This is not actually a very effective tactic, and may already be passing out of use in early 1999 after about two years of life. In both mail and news, it's essentially impossible to keep a smart address harvester from mining out the addresses in the message header and trace lines. Therefore the only people who can be protected are third parties mentioned by email address in the message - not a common enough case to interest spammers.

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spamhaus spam'hows n.

Pejorative term for an internet service provider that permits or even encourages spam mailings from its systems. The plural is `spamhausen'. There is a web page devoted to tracking spamhausen.

The most notorious of the spamhausen was Sanford Wallace's Cyber Promotions Inc., shut down by a lawsuit on 16 October 1997. The anniversary of the shutdown is celebrated on Usenet as Spam Freedom Day, but lesser imitators of the Spamford still infest various murky corners of the net. Since prosecution of spammers became routine under the junk-fax laws and statues specifically targeting spam, spamhausen have declined in relative importance; today, hit-and-run attacks by spammers using relay rape and throwaway accounts on reputable ISPs seem to account for most of the flow.

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spamvertize v.

To advertise using spam. Pejorative.

Node:spangle, Next:spawn, Previous:spamvertize, Up:= S =

spangle n.

[UK] The singular of bells and whistles. See also spungle.

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spawn n.,vi.

1. [techspeak] In UNIX parlance, to create a child process from within a process. Technically this is a `fork'; the term `spawn' is a bit more general and is used for threads (lightweight processes) as well as traditional heavyweight processes. 2. In gaming, meant to indicate where (`spawn-point') and when a player comes to life (or `re-spawns') after being killed. Opposite of frag.

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special-case vt.

To write unique code to handle input to or situations arising in a program that are somehow distinguished from normal processing. This would be used for processing of mode switches or interrupt characters in an interactive interface (as opposed, say, to text entry or normal commands), or for processing of hidden flags in the input of a batch program or filter.

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speedometer n.

A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes). The pattern is shifted left every N times the operating system goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern indicates that the system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows down as the system becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV series.

Historical note: One computer, the GE 600 (later Honeywell 6000) actually had an analog speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per second.

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spell n.

Syn. incantation.

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spelling flame n. //

[Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think any correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.

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spider

The Web-walking part of a search engine that collects pages for indexing in the search engine's database. Also called a bot. The best-known spider is Scooter, the web-walker for the Alta Vista search engine.

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spider food n.

Keywords embedded (usually invisibly) into a web page to attract search engines (spiders). The intended result of including spider food in one's web page is to insure that the page appears high on the list of matching entries to a search engine query. There are right and wrong ways to do this; the right way is a discreet `meta keywords' tag, the wrong way is to embed many repeats of a keyword in comments (and many search engines now detect and ignore the latter).

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spiffy /spi'fee/ adj.

1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. "Have you seen the spiffy X version of empire yet?" 2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to 1.

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spike v.

To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary) device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change, which would be called hardwired).

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spin vi.

Equivalent to buzz. More common among C and Unix programmers. See the discussion of `spinlock' under busy-wait.

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spl /S-P-L/

[abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional Unix kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's at spl 6 today" would mean that he is very hard to interrupt. "Wait till I finish this; I'll spl down then." See also interrupts locked out.

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splash screen n.

[Mac users] Syn. banner, sense 3.

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splat n.