:Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers:
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From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards has been developing separately from
Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a
stratum of `pirate boards' inhabited by {cracker}s, phone phreaks, and
{warez d00dz}. These people (mostly teenagers running PC-clones from
their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon,
heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.
Though crackers often call themselves `hackers', they aren't (they
typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet
expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems).
Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless,
this lexicon covers much of it so the reader will be able to
understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.
Here is a brief guide to cracker and {warez d00dz} usage:
* Misspell frequently. The substitutions
phone => fone
freak => phreak
are obligatory.
* Always substitute `z's for `s's. (i.e. "codes" -> "codez").
* Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey
Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").
* Use the emphatic `k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome")
frequently.
* Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").
* Substitute `0' for `o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").
* TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE
TIME.
These traits are similar to those of {B1FF}, who originated as a
parody of naive BBS users. For further discussion of the pirate-board
subculture, see {lamer}, {elite}, {leech}, {poser}, {cracker}, and
especially {warez d00dz}.