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This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain.
Before the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, Internet slang defined a luser (sometimes expanded to local user; also luzer or luzzer) as a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. [1] The word is a blend of "loser" and "user". [2] Among hackers, the word luser takes on a broad meaning, referring to any normal user (in other words, not a "guru"), with the implication the person is also a loser. The term is partially interchangeable with the hacker term lamer .
The term can also signify a layman with only user account privileges, as opposed to a power user or administrator, who has knowledge of, and access to, superuser accounts; for example, an end luser who cannot be trusted with a root account for system administration. It is popular with technical support staff who have to deal with lusers as part of their job, often metaphorically employing a LART (Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool, also known as a clue-by-four, [3] cluestick, or cluebat), meaning turning off the user's access to computer resources and the like.
The Jargon File states that the word was coined around 1975 at MIT, [4] although LUSER is visible in CTSS source code circa 1969 in subroutines involving spying on and killing users and deleting their files and directories. [5] Under ITS, when a user first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer. A patch to the system was then written to print "14 losers" instead of "14 users", as a joke. For a while, several hackers who disagreed on the appropriateness of the change struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the backs of the others; any time a user logged into the computer it was equally probable that a user would see, say, "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later, ITS also had the command "luser", which attempted to summon assistance from a list of designated helpers.
Although ITS ceased to be used in the mid-1990s, use of the term continued to spread, partly because in Unix-style computer operating systems, "user" designates all unprivileged accounts, while the superuser, or root, is the special user account used for system administration. "root" is the conventional name of the user who has all rights or permissions (to all files and programs) in all modes (single- or multi-user). The usage lives on, however, and the term "luser" is often seen in program comments and on Usenet.
On IRC, /lusers (which abbreviates "list users") is a common command to get the number of users connected to a server or network. [6]
This article is based in part on the Jargon File, which is in the public domain.
The terms foobar, foo, bar, baz, and others are used as metasyntactic variables and placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation. They have been used to name entities such as variables, functions, and commands whose exact identity is unimportant and serve only to demonstrate a concept.
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term hacker has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone who utilizes their technical know-how of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them – hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques in order to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools to mask their identities online, posing as criminals themselves. Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. On the other hand, hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra- and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies, and employed by state actors as a weapon of both legal and illegal warfare.
Leet, also known as eleet or leetspeak, is a system of modified spellings used primarily on the Internet. It often uses character replacements in ways that play on the similarity of their glyphs via reflection or other resemblance. Additionally, it modifies certain words based on a system of suffixes and alternate meanings. There are many dialects or linguistic varieties in different online communities.
A sysop is an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system (BBS) or an online service virtual community. The phrase may also be used to refer to administrators of other Internet-based network services. Sysops typically do not earn money, but donate their activity to the community.
In information handling, the U.S. Federal Standard 1037C defines a hard copy as a permanent reproduction, or copy, in the form of a physical object, of any media suitable for direct use by a person, of displayed or transmitted data. Examples of hard copies include teleprinter pages, continuous printed tapes, computer printouts, and radio photo prints. On the other hand, physical objects such as magnetic tapes, floppy disks, or non-printed punched paper tapes are not defined as hard copies by 1037C.
Newbie, newb, noob, noobie, n00b or nub is a slang term for a novice or newcomer, or somebody inexperienced in a profession or activity. Contemporary use can particularly refer to a beginner or new user of computers, often concerning Internet activity, such as online gaming or Linux use.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware, to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but how it is done and whether it is exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damage. Some famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.
Lamer is a jargon or slang name originally applied in cracker and phreaker culture to someone who did not really understand what they were doing. Today it is also loosely applied by IRC, BBS, demosceners, and online gaming users to anyone perceived to be contemptible. In general, the term has come to describe someone who is willfully ignorant of how things work. It is derived from the word "lame".
In computing, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system (OS), the actual name of this account might be root, administrator, admin or supervisor. In some cases, the actual name of the account is not the determining factor; on Unix-like systems, for example, the user with a user identifier (UID) of zero is the superuser, regardless of the name of that account; and in systems which implement a role based security model, any user with the role of superuser can carry out all actions of the superuser account. The principle of least privilege recommends that most users and applications run under an ordinary account to perform their work, as a superuser account is capable of making unrestricted, potentially adverse, system-wide changes.
Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) is a time-sharing operating system developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with help from Project MAC. The name is the jocular complement of the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).
Administrator or admin may refer to:
Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software.
Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug, a design flaw, or a configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user. The result is that an application with more privileges than intended by the application developer or system administrator can perform unauthorized actions.
Owned is a slang word that originated in the 1990s among hackers where it referred to "rooting" or gaining administrative control over someone else's computer. The term eventually spread to gamers, who used the term to mean defeat in gaming. Other variations of the word owned include own3d, 0wn3d, pwned, pwnt, POWER OWNED and pooned, terms which incorporate elements of leetspeak.
Chainik is a term that implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn, but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and someone using a computer system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks.
In computing, privilege is defined as the delegation of authority to perform security-relevant functions on a computer system. A privilege allows a user to perform an action with security consequences. Examples of various privileges include the ability to create a new user, install software, or change kernel functions.
A user error is an error made by the human user of a complex system, usually a computer system, in interacting with it. Although the term is sometimes used by human–computer interaction practitioners, the more formal human error term is used in the context of human reliability.
A user is a person who utilizes a computer or network service.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
A (figurative) peon is a person with little authority, often assigned unskilled tasks, or an underling or any person subjected to capricious or unreasonable oversight. In this sense, peon is often used in either a derogatory or self-effacing context.