ABENE, MARK see PHIBER OPTIK ACID PHREAK (1970-Present) Handle of Elias Ladopoulos. Current "leader" of MOD. Could be reached until recently at ap@gti.net, though I think that account may no longer exist. [Name comes from "phreak," as in phone phreak, and "acid," so that it is a pun on acid freak, as in someone who takes a lot of LSD. He doesn’t take acid, though; he listens to acid house music.] ACTS [Automated Coin Toll System] Used in payphones to show that you have indeed put money in, so you can now make a call. Can be fooled by a Red Box. ADMINISTRATION One of the largest hack/phreak groups to ever exist. It also included a group called Team Hackers ‘86. Members included Adolf Hitler, Alpha Centauri, Author Unknown, British Bloke, Dark Priest, David Lightman 214, Dr. Pepper, Hewlett Hackard, Major Havoc, Mane Phrame, Mark Twain, Phoneline Phantom 1, Red Baron, Renegade Rebel, Sasha Kinski, The President and Walter Mitty. ADVENTURE An old Atari 2600 video game that Knight Lightning played when he was seven and discovered secret rooms. This led to an interest in finding secrets in computers. Interestingly, the secret room KL found (which contained the initials of a programmer) is often considered to be the first easter egg ever put in a commercial program. AGENT STEAL (1961-Present) Handle of Justin Tanner Peterson, alias Samuel Grossman, alias Eric Heinz. Hacker and Los Angeles club promotor who apparently worked for the FBI after being jailed for credit card fraud; gathered info on big guns like Mitnick and Poulsen for the Bureau. Went on the run for 10 months before being apprehended in 1994. AGORAPHOBIA Literally, fear of everything. When a person must be totally isolated from the world. (Among other things, the Finn in Gibson’s Sprawl Series in agoraphobic.) [From Latin, "fear of all."] AGRAJAG THE PROLONGED Former member of the Hitchhikers and the Legion of Doom. He was also a programmer for old gaming machines. [Handle is from a character in _Life, the Universe and Everything_, the third book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy by Douglas Adams. I believe the person using the handle has combined the names of the characters of both Agrajag and Wowbanger the Infinitely Prolonged.] AI [Artifical Intelligence] see ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AL [Artificial Life] see ARTIFICIAL LIFE ALLIANCE Former AT&T trademark referring to teleconferencing systems ALTAIR The very first personal computer, introduced 1975. Really pathetic by our standards, but the first computer at all available to the common person. [From a destination in the Romulan neutral zone in the classic _Star Trek_ episode "Balance of Terror."] ALT.2600 Hacking Usenet newsgroup. From the magazine, _2600: The Hacker Quarterly_. There are a few variants: alt.2600.moderated, alt.2600.hackerz, alt.2600.phreakz and alt.2600hz. [In USENET form, "alt," for "alternative," and "2600," for the subgroup 2600.] AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH see AT&T AMERICA ONLINE [AOL] Very evil commercial online service that rose from the ashes of a BBS called QuantumLink in 1990, and the largest commercial service. They’ve had an enormous problem with hackers, and their solution is to try and stop the flow of programs they don’t like and shut down any chat room involving hacking, while the child molestor rooms stay. A number of programs have been written to rip them off, most notably AOHell. ANALOG A way of representing information that uses a continuous range of values. Opposite of digital-- while a CD is digital, a tape is analog; while a computer is digital, an abacus is analog. ANARCHY (1) Total chaos and disorder. (2) A time in a country, usually after a revolution, where there is no government, the most recent example probably being the former Soviet Union after the breakup of the Eastern Bloc. This condition has never been prolonged for very long. (3) The tenets of the political science of anarchism, the ultimate goal of which is the removal of any rule by anyone or anything. (4) [Anarchy file] A file (usually text) that details such actions as how to brew nitroglycerin and other destructive things. [From Greek, "a," meaning nobody, and "-archy," meaning "rule." The "n" is in there because it’s too hard to pronounce "aarchy."] AOHELL Most famous program for hacking America Online; first coded in 1994 and contains a full suite of utilities. AOL's attempts at shutting down its distribution haven't worked very well. AOL [America Online] see AMERICA ONLINE APPLE COMPUTER, INCORPORATED Very large computer corporation whose main product is the Macintosh and its associated system software, the MacOS. Founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (incidentally, former phone phreaks) and created the Apple IIe in 1979, which became the standard personal computer. In 1984, they released the Macintosh ("and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984"). While the second largest computer manufacturer in the world, the Mac operating system continues to lose market share. APPLEGATE, CHRISTINA Former model and actress, notably on the television show _Married With Children_. Rumors were spread that Erik Bloodaxe dated her (he says they aren't true), and her credit report was pulled by MOD. AREA CODE The prefix in a phone number, based on location, to add to the number of possible phone numbers. When two or more hackers have the same handle and it is in dispute as to who had it first or who deserves it, it is used to differentiate, or at least it was in the 1980s. (This is used in this file as well, as with the two Knightmares and Dr. Who.) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [AI] Used to refer to "smart" programs that do their jobs quickly and with minimum of user input, as well as the code written in computer games governing the actions of non-user controlled characters or enemies. Also used to refer to system software that can reason; this has not been achieved. The best examples of this are the insane AIs in _Neuromancer_ and HAL 9000 in _2001: A Space Odyssey ARTIFICIAL LIFE [AL] Living programs or robots; viruses may be the early, primitive forms of artificial life. Maxis makes programs using relatively advanced artificial life (notably _SimLife_) THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS PHIBER see PHIBER OPTIK ASCII ART Art done in plain text. This is fairly difficult. Portraits of people done in ASCII art usually only work if the person has some major distinguishing characteristics; for instance, while my friend Einsteinium might come across fairly recognizable because he has long hair and glasses, I would not be at all distinguishable because I have contact lenses and fairly normal length hair, and my only really distinguishing feature is my red hair, which cannot be shown in ASCII because it can’t support colors. That and my incredible radiating handsomeness, which unfortunately cannot be shown in ASCII either. :) [From American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the set of bits created in the 1980s to represent characters.] AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph] Originally American Bell Telephone, the company that started the telephone. It was bought and, under the tutelage of another huge company, became a monopolous phone provider. Huge telco that was the Microsoft of the Seventies and Eighties. It was broken up by the justice department in 1982, which created lots of little baby RBOCS. In 1990 their phone network crashed, which got them into a lot of trouble. See also DEATH STAR ATLANTA THREE Urvile, Leftist and Prophet, members of the Atlanta chapter of LOD that were thrown in jail during the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 AUTOMATED COIN TOLL SYSTEM see ACTS AVATAR From a modern, Internet perspective, the term avatar was first adopted from Neal Stephenson to refer to the psychological persona people take on when they anonymously enter cyberspace. However, it is increasingly being used more literally as a term for the icons representing a user in a certain programs on the Internet. [First used from an Internet perspective in 1992 in _Snow Crash_, by Neal Stephenson, in one of those self-fulfilling SF prophecies. Stephenson got the name from the Hindu concept of avatars, which are the personification of various deities or entities.] AXE To reformat a disk or delete a file