The New Hacker's Dictionary
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Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also [10298]heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would [10299]barf. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical laws to the most modern science.
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phase-wrapping n.
[MIT] Syn. [10303]wrap around, sense 2.
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PHB /P-H-B/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From the [10307]Dilbert character, the archetypal halfwitted middle-[10308]management type. See also [10309]pointy-haired.
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phreaker /freek'r/ n.
One who engages in [10313]phreaking. See also [10314]blue box.
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phreaking /freek'ing/ n.
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[from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science of [10318]cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks) (see [10319]cracking).
At one time phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant crossover between the hacker community and the hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary "TAP Newsletter". This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in the hands of less responsible phreaks. Around the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes and punishments of gangs like the `414 group' turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore.
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picopref.
[SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] Smaller than [10323]nano-; used in the same rather loose connotative way as [10324]nanoand micro-. This usage is not yet common in the way [10325]nanoand [10326]microare, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker. See also [10327]quantifiers, [10328]micro-.
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pig-tail
[radio hams] A short piece of cable with two connectors on each end for converting between one connector type and another. Common pig-tails are 9-to-25-pin serial-port converters and cables to connect PCMCIA network cards to an RJ-45 network cable.
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pilot error n.
[Sun: from aviation] A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare [10335]UBD). "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers." "That's not a bug, that's pilot error. His sendmail.cf is hosed."
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ping
[from the submariners' term for a sonar pulse] 1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and alertness of another. The Unix command ping(8) can be used to do this manually (note that ping(8)'s author denies the widespread folk etymology that the name was ever intended as acronym for `Packet INternet Groper'). Occasionally used as a phone greeting. See [10339]ACK, also [10340]ENQ. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To
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get the attention of. 4. vt. To send a message to all members of a [10341]mailing list requesting an [10342]ACK (in order to verify that everybody's addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends." 5. n. A quantum packet of happiness. People who are very happy tend to exude pings; furthermore, one can intentionally create pings and aim them at a needy party (e.g., a depressed person). This sense of ping may appear as an exclamation; "Ping!" (I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I have been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form "pingfulness", which is used to describe people who exude pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of language, "pingfulness" can also be used as an exclamation, in which case it's a much stronger exclamation than just "ping"!). Oppose [10343]blargh.
The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet group comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting through. So he used the sound-recording feature on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly invoked ping(8), listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet. Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over, "Ping ... ping ... ping ..." as long as the network was up. He turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no time.
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Ping O' Death n.
A notorious [10347]exploit that (when first discovered) could be easily used to crash a wide variety of machines by overunning size limits in their TCP/IP stacks. First revealed in late 1996. The open-source Unix
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community patched its systems to remove the vulnerability within days or weeks, the closed-source OS vendors generally took months. While the difference in response times repeated a pattern familiar from other security incidents, the accompanying glare of Web-fueled publicity proved unusually embarrassing to the OS vendors and so passed into history and myth. The term is now used to refer to any nudge delivered by network wizards over the network that causes bad things to happen on the system being nudged. For the full story on the original exploit, see [10348]http://www.insecure.org/sploits/ping-o-death.html.
Compare with 'kamikaze packet,' 'Finger of Death' and 'Chernobyl packet.'
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ping storm n.
A form of [10352]DoS attack consisting of a flood of [10353]ping requests (normally used to check network conditions) designed to disrupt the normal activity of a system. This act is sometimes called `ping lashing' or `ping flood'. Compare [10354]mail storm, [10355]broadcast storm.
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pink wire n.
[from the pink PTFE wire used in military equipment] As [10359]blue wire, but used in military applications. 2. vi. To add a pink wire to a board.
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pipe n.
[common] Idiomatically, one's connection to the Internet; in context, the expansion "bit pipe" is understood. A "fat pipe" is a line with T1 or higher capacity. A person with a 28.8 modem might be heard to complain "I need a bigger pipe".
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pistol n.
[IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unix rm * makes such a nice pistol!"
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pixel sort n.
[Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process of [10369]crunching it. Disparagingly used for `lossy' methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human eye. The term `pixel sort' implies distrust of this theory. Compare [10370]bogo-sort.
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pizza box n.
[Sun] The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes.
Two meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is.
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plaid screen n.
[XEROX PARC] A `special effect' that occurs when certain kinds of [10377]memory smashes overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display. The term "salt and pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin. Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the [10378]X demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a [10379]display hack.
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plain-ASCII /playn-as'kee/
Syn. [10383]flat-ASCII.
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plan file n.
[Unix] On systems that support [10387]finger, the `.plan' file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes (like a [10388]sig block). See also [10389]Hacking X for Y.
A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of "scrolling plan files" which are one-dimensional animations made using only the printable ASCII character set, carriage return and line feed, avoiding terminal specific escape sequences, since the [10390]finger command will (for security reasons; see [10391]letterbomb) not pass the escape character.
Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and most original animations. Various animation characters include:
Centipede: mmmmme
Lorry/Truck: oo-oP
Andalusian Video Snail: ---@/
and a compiler (ASP) is available on Usenet for producing them. See also [10392]twirling baton.
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platinum-iridium adj.
Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured. Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in that same vault -- this replaced an earlier definition as 10^(-7) times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram is now the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique artifact.) "This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris." Compare [10396]golden.
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playpen n.
[IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare [10400]salt mines.
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