> cat /etc/lexicon

Lexicon

A field guide to the language of the three verticals: phreaking and security, electronic music, and the old weird internet. Not exhaustive, and growing. For virus-specific terms, see the museum glossary.

2

[SIG]2600 Hz: The in-band signaling tone AT&T used to mark a long distance trunk as idle. Whistle or play 2600 Hz into a call and the switch believes the line is free, handing you control of the trunk. The whole site is named after it.see also: Blue box, Phreaking

A

[MUS]Acid house: A genre built on the squelching, resonant sound of a misused TB-303, born in Chicago in the mid-1980s and central to the rave era.see also: TB-303
[MUS]Ambient: Music that prioritizes atmosphere and texture over rhythm and melody, meant to be as ignorable as it is listenable, a term Brian Eno made explicit.
[STA]ANSI art: Text-mode artwork made from the extended character set and color codes of the IBM PC, used to give BBSes their login screens and identity.see also: BBS

B

[STA]BBS: A bulletin board system, a computer you dialed into directly over the phone line to read messages, trade files, and play games. The social internet before the internet.see also: ANSI art, The scene (warez)
[SIG]Black box: A circuit wired into your own phone line that manipulates its voltage so incoming long distance calls register as never answered, making them free for the person calling you.see also: Blue box
[SIG]Blue box: A device that generates the full set of multi-frequency tones AT&T used to route calls, letting a phreak place free long distance calls and dial anywhere. Wozniak and Jobs sold them before they built Apple.see also: 2600 Hz, Red box, MF (multi-frequency)

C

[STA]Cracktro: A small animated intro a cracking group attaches to pirated software to sign their work, with scrolling text, music, and effects. A direct cousin of the demoscene.see also: The scene (warez), Demoscene

D

[STA]Demoscene: A subculture that writes programs to generate real-time audiovisual demos, pushing hardware to its limits purely to show off craft. It grew straight out of the cracking scene.see also: Cracktro
[SIG]DTMF: Dual-tone multi-frequency, the touch-tone system where each key on a phone plays two frequencies at once. It is the sound you hear when you dial.see also: MF (multi-frequency)
[MUS]Dub techno: A minimal, echo-soaked strain of techno that runs chords through long delays and reverb, defined by Berlin's Basic Channel in the early 1990s.
[SIG]DXing: The hobby of tuning in distant or hard to catch radio signals for the sport of it. DXers were the ones who first logged and cataloged numbers stations.see also: Numbers station

H

[MUS]Hauntology: An aesthetic of nostalgia for futures that never arrived, built from the textures of old library music, public broadcasts, and decayed tape. Ghost Box and Boards of Canada are touchstones.

I

[MUS]IDM: Intelligent dance music, a slightly awkward label for the experimental electronic music tied to Warp Records and artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre.see also: Spectrogram
[STA]IRC: Internet Relay Chat, the real-time text chat protocol from 1988 that hosted everything from hacker channels to open source projects to file trading.

M

[SIG]MF (multi-frequency): The pairs of audio tones telephone switches used to signal each other and route calls, including the KP (key pulse) and ST (start) markers. A blue box speaks MF.see also: Blue box, DTMF
[MUS]Musique concrete: A compositional approach that builds music from recorded real-world sounds manipulated on tape, rather than from notes played on instruments. A direct ancestor of sampling.see also: Oramics

N

[SIG]Numbers station: A shortwave radio station that broadcasts cryptic sequences of spoken numbers, used by intelligence agencies to send one-way messages to agents who decode them with a one-time pad.see also: One-time pad, DXing

O

[SIG]One-time pad: An encryption method that is mathematically unbreakable when used correctly: a truly random key, as long as the message, used exactly once. The only catch is sharing and protecting the key.see also: Numbers station
[MUS]Oramics: Daphne Oram's technique and machine for making sound by drawing shapes onto strips of film, turning a visual gesture directly into tone.see also: Musique concrete

P

[SIG]Phreaking: Exploring and manipulating telephone systems, the practice that predates and shaped computer hacking. Phreakers treated the network as a thing to be understood and bent, usually through sound.see also: 2600 Hz, Blue box

R

[SIG]Red box: A device that mimics the tones a payphone sends when you drop coins, fooling the system into registering money that was never deposited. Bernie S went to prison over one.see also: Blue box
[STA]RFC: Request for Comments, the document series that defines how the internet works. The humility of the name is the point: standards proposed in the open, for comment.

S

[SIG]Social engineering: Manipulating people rather than machines to gain access or information, through impersonation, pretext, or plain confidence. Often the easiest exploit in any system.
[MUS]Spectrogram: A visual plot of a sound's frequencies over time. Aphex Twin famously hid images, including his own face, that appear only when a track is viewed as a spectrogram.see also: IDM

T

[MUS]TB-303: A Roland bass synthesizer from 1981, sold to replace a bass guitarist and considered a failure. Producers misused its squelching filter into the sound of acid house.see also: Acid house, TR-808
[STA]The scene (warez): The competitive underground that cracks and distributes copyrighted software, racing to be first to release. Its calling cards are the cracktro and the NFO file.see also: Cracktro, BBS
[MUS]TR-808: A Roland drum machine whose unrealistic analog sounds, especially its booming kick, became the backbone of hip-hop, electro, and dance music.see also: TB-303

U

[STA]Usenet: A distributed discussion system organized into newsgroups, predating the web and home to decades of technical argument, culture, and the original meaning of 'spam'.

W

[SIG]War dialing: Automatically dialing large ranges of phone numbers to find the ones answered by modems, fax machines, or other systems worth probing. Named after the film WarGames.see also: Phreaking
[STA]Webring: A circle of independent websites linked one to the next, so a visitor could travel a whole community by clicking 'next'. The pre-algorithm way to find related sites.
[MUS]White label: A vinyl record pressed with a blank or plain label, used to test or promote a track on the strength of the music alone, before any artwork or hype.

Z

[SIG]Zero-day: A software vulnerability unknown to the vendor, so there have been zero days to patch it. Zero-day exploits are valuable precisely because no defense exists yet.