B1FF/bif/, BIFF, n. The most famous {pseudo}, and the prototypical {newbie}. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, 'cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ KØØL DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of {talk mode} abbreviations, a long {sig block} (sometimes even a {doubled sig}), and unbounded naivete. B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: [email protected]. [1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was originally created by Joe Talmadge , also the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton, who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been posted for the amusement of the net at large. See also {Jeff K.} --ESR] B5. [common] Abbreviation for "Babylon 5", a science-fiction TV series as revered among hackers as was the original Star Trek. back doorn. [common] A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Syn. {trap door}; may also be called a wormhole. See also {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would recognize when the login command was being recompiled and insert some code recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system whether or not an account had been created for him. Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler, you have to use the compiler -- so Thompson also arranged that the compiler would recognize when it was compiling a version of itself, and insert into the recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled login the code to allow Thompson entry -- and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in the sources. The Turing lecture that reported this truly moby hack was later published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Communications of the ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763 (text available at http://www.acm.org/classics/). Ken Thompson has since confirmed that this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login across the network by someone using the login name "kt". backbone cabaln. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {Usenet} during most of the 1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were speculated on in public. The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact. This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See {Eric Conspiracy} for one example. Part of the background for this kind of humor is that many hackers cultivate a fondness for conspiracy theory considered as a kind of surrealist art; see the bibliography entry on Illuminatus! for the novel that launched this trend. See {NANA} for the subsequent history of "the Cabal". backbone siten.,obs. Formerly, a key Usenet and email site, one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, {DEC}'s Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {leaf site}. [2001 update: This term has passed into history. The UUCP network world that gave it meaning is gone; everyone is on the Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. Today one might see references to a "backbone router" instead --ESR]
