whack v.
According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of NeWS, GOSMACS
and Java), to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it
works." (See whacker.) It is
actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the
change is small and well-defined and you are very good at glarking things from context. As a trivial
example, it is relatively easy to change all stderr
writes to stdout writes in a piece of C filter code
which remains otherwise mysterious.
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whack-a-mole n.
[from the carnival game which involves quickly and repeatedly
hitting the heads of mechanical moles with a mallet as they pop
up from their holes.] 1. The practice of repeatedly causing
spammers' throwaway
accounts and drop boxes to be terminated. 2. After sense
1 became established in the mid-1990s the term passed into more
generalized use, and now is commonly found in such combinations
as `whack-a-mole windows'; the obnoxious pop-ip advertisement
windows spawned in flocks when you surg to sites like Geocities
or Tripod.