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. (more)

We’ve already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) “This sentence no verb”, or “Too repetetetive”, or “Bad speling”, or “Incorrectspa cing.” Similarly, intentional spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion (more)

Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant attitude are highly valued — but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser. (more)

Police are holding a Tel Aviv man who is suspected of propositioning about 1,000 children via the Internet.

Police believe that Avinoam Braverman, 32, whose custody was extended by the Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court yesterday, attempted to lure girls aged 8 to 15 into having Internet sex with him. He is also suspected of pressuring some of the girls to meet him for sex in real life. (more)

Imitation Web sites of both Google and YouTube have emerged in China as the country faces off against the real Google over its local operations.

YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is owned by Google and blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based company not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks. (more)

Internet giant Google has said it may end its operations in China following a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack originating from the country. It did not accuse Beijing directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine – google.cn. This could result in closing the site, and its Chinese offices, Google said. (more)

Google Inc. has publicly stated that it is considering pulling out of the fast-growing Chinese market. The statement was made as a result of an investigation over several weeks into China’s Internet censorship system that revealed a systematic and targeted hacking into Google’s corporate infrastructure. (more)