From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local,
MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet
hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum
of `pirate boards' inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly
teenagers running IBM-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: