backbone cabal n.
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.
See NANA for the subsequent history of "the Cabal".
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.
See NANA for the subsequent history of "the Cabal".
Related:
- backbone cabal: n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed
through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of {USENET}
during most of the 1980s.
The cabal {mailing list} disbanded in late 1988... - TINC //
[Usenet] Abbreviation: "There Is No Cabal".
See backbone cabal and NANA, but note that this... - Internet n.
The mother of all networks. First
incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET,
a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. ... - NANA //
[Usenet] The newsgroups news.admin.net-abuse.*,
devoted to fighting spam and network abuse. Each individual... - security through obscurity
(alt. `security by obscurity')
A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of
coping with security holes -
namely, ignoring them, documenting neither any known... - foo /foo/
1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very
common] Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely
anything,
esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First... - Lumber Cartel n.
A mythical conspiracy accused by
spam-spewers of funding anti-spam activism in order to force
the direct-mail promotions industry back onto paper.
Hackers, predictably, responded by forming a "Lumber... - kremvax /krem-vaks/ n.
[from the then large number of
Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax]
Originally,
a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced... - VAX /vaks/ n.
1. [from Virtual Address eXtension] The
most successful minicomputer design in industry history,
possibly excepting its immediate ancestor, the PDP...
