wannabee /won'*-bee/ n.
(also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term
recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act
like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] A would-be
hacker. The connotations of this
term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the
subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering larval stage, it is
semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers
remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of
any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or suit, it is derogatory, implying that said person
is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't,
fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all
about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication
of the wannabee nature. Compare
newbie.
Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly
different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago.
When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in
larval stage, the process of
becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by
models known in popular culture -- communities formed
spontaneously around people who, as individuals, felt
irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees
experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become
similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever;
society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after
1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk
hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out
to be hackers and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the
popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well,
one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time
hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the
change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about
the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.
Node:war dialer, Next:-ware, Previous:wannabee, Up:=
W =
war dialer n.
A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of
phone numbers and records those which answer with handshake tones
(and so might be entry points to computer or telecommunications
systems). Some of these programs have become quite sophisticated,
and can now detect modem, fax, or PBX tones and log each one
separately. The war dialer is one of the most important tools in
the phreaker's kit. These programs
evolved from early demon
dialers.