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PHB
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phreaker
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phase-wrapping
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PHB/P-H-B/
[Usenet; common; rarely spoken] Abbreviation, "Pointy-Haired Boss". From theDilbertcharacter, the archetypal halfwitted middle-managementtype. See alsopointy-haired.
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phreaker
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phreaking
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PHB
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phreaker/freek'r/ n.
One who engages inphreaking. See alsoblue box.
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phreaking
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pico-
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phreaker
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phreaking/freek'ing/ n.
[from `phone phreak'] 1. The art and science ofcrackingthe 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) (seecracking).
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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pico-
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pig-tail
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phreaking
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pico-pref.
[SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] Smaller thannano-; used in the same rather loose connotative way asnano-andmicro-. This usage is not yet common in the waynano-andmicro-are, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker. See alsoquantifiers,micro-.
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pig-tail
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pilot error
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pico-
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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
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ping
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pig-tail
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pilot errorn.
[Sun: from aviation] A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compareUBD). "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers." "That's not a bug, that's pilot error. Hissendmail.cfis hosed."
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ping
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Ping O' Death
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pilot error
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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 commandping(8)can be used to do this manually (note thatping(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. SeeACK, alsoENQ. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To get the attention of. 4. vt. To send a message to all members of amailing listrequesting anACK(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"!). Opposeblargh.
The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman on the Usenet groupcomp.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 invokedping(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
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ping storm
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ping
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Ping O' Deathn.
A notoriousexploitthat (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 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 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
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pink wire
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Ping O' Death
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ping stormn.
A form ofDoS attackconsisting of a flood ofpingrequests (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'. Comparemail storm,broadcast storm.
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pink wire
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pipe
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ping storm
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pink wiren.
[from the pink PTFE wire used in military equipment] Asblue wire, but used in military applications. 2. vi. To add a pink wire to a board.
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pipe
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pistol
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pink wire
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pipen.
[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
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pixel sort
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pipe
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pistoln.
[IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unixrm *makes such a nice pistol!"
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pixel sort
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pizza box
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pistol
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pixel sortn.
[Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses valuable data in the process ofcrunching 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. Comparebogo-sort.
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pizza box
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plaid screen
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pixel sort
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pizza boxn.
[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
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plain-ASCII
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plaid screenn.
[XEROX PARC] A `special effect' that occurs when certain kinds ofmemory 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 theXdemos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as adisplay hack.
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plain-ASCII
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plan file
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plain-ASCII/playn-as'kee/
Syn.flat-ASCII.
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plan file
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plan filen.
[Unix] On systems that supportfinger, 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 asig block). See alsoHacking 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 thefingercommand will (for security reasons; seeletterbomb) 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:
and a compiler (ASP) is available on Usenet for producing them. See alsotwirling baton.
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platinum-iridium
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playpen
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platinum-iridiumadj.
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." Comparegolden.
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playpen
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playte
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playpenn.
[IBM] A room where programmers work. Comparesalt mines.
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playte
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plingnet
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playte/playt/
16 bits, by analogy withnybbleandbyte. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See alsodynnerandcrumb. General discussion of such terms is undernybble.
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plingnet
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plokta
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plingnet/pling'net/ n.
Syn.UUCPNET. Also seeCommonwealth Hackish, which uses `pling' forbang(as inbang path).
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plokta
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plokta/plok't*/ v.
[acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into `plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes them down, hoping for some useful response.
A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or Usenet articles from new users -- the text might end with
^X^Cqquit:q^CendxexitZZ^D?help
as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect tries piling up at the end of the message....
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plonk
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plonkexcl.,vt.
[Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for cheap booze, or `plonker' for someone behaving stupidly (latter is lit. equivalent to Yiddish `schmuck')] The sound anewbiemakes as he falls to the bottom of akill file. While it originated in thenewsgrouptalk.bizarre, this term (usually written "*plonk*") is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of public ridicule.
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plug-and-pray
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plugh
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plug-and-prayadj.,vi.
Parody of the techspeak term `plug-and-play', describing a PC peripheral card which is claimed to have no need for hardware configuration via DIP switches, and which should be work as soon as it is inserted in the PC. Unfortunately, even the PCI bus is not up to pulling this off reliably, and people who have to do installation or troubleshoot PCs soon find themselves longing for the DIP switches.
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plugh
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plumbing
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plugh/ploogh/ v.
[from theADVENTgame] Seexyzzy.
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plumbing
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PM
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plugh
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plumbingn.
[Unix] Term used forshellcode, so called because of the prevalence of `pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction `hairy plumbing' (seehairy). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out ofsort(1),comm(1), andtr(1)with a little plumbing." See alsotee.