Microsoft Helps Parents understand leetspeak

[Viin]

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

A parent's primer to computer slang
Understand how your kids communicate online to help protect them
Published: February 4, 2005

Graphic of computer slang characters

While it's important to respect your children's privacy, understanding what your teenager's online slang means and how to decipher could be important in certain situations and as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of "elite") is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of Pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Leet words can be expressed in hundreds of ways using different substitutions and combinations, but once one understands that nearly all characters are formed as phonemes and symbols, leetspeek isn't difficult to translate. Also, because leet is not a formal or regional dialect, any given word can be interpreted differently, so it's important to use discretion when evaluating terms. The following serves as a brief (and by no means definitive) introduction to leet through examples.
Key points for interpreting leetspeek

•   Numbers are often used as letters. The term "leet" could be written as "1337," with "1" replacing the letter L, "3" posing as a backwards letter E, and "7" resembling the letter T. Others include "8" replacing the letter B, "9" used as a G, "0" (zero) in lieu of O, and so on.

•   Non-alphabet characters can be used to replace the letters they resemble. For example, "5" or even "$" can replace the letter S. Applying this style, the word "leetspeek" can be written as "133t5p33k" or even "!337$p34k," with "4" replacing the letter A.

•   Letters can be substituted for other letters that may sound alike. Using "Z" for a final letter S, and "X" for words ending in the letters C or K is common. For example, leetspeekers might refer to their computer "5x1llz" (skills).

•   Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed. Some leetspeekers will capitalize every letter except for vowels (LiKe THiS) and otherwise reject conventional English style and grammar, or drop vowels from words (such as converting very to "vry").

•   Mistakes are often left uncorrected. Common typing misspellings (typos) such as "teh" instead of the are left uncorrected or sometimes adopted to replace the correct spelling.

•   Non-alphanumeric characters may be combined to form letters. For example, using slashes to create "/\/\" can substitute for the letter M, and two pipes combined with a hyphen to form "|-|" is often used in place of the letter H. Thus, the word ham could be written as "|-|4/\/\."

•   The suffix "0rz" is often appended to words for emphasis or to make them plural. For example, "h4xx0rz," "sk1llz0rz," and "pwnz0rz," are plural or emphasized versions (or both) of hacks, skills, and owns.

It's important to remember that the leetspeek community encourages new forms and awards individual creativity, resulting in a dynamic written language that eludes conformity or consistency. However, there are a few standard terms. The following is a sample of key words that haven't changed fundamentally (although variations occur) since the invention of leetspeek. The first series is of particular concern, as their use could be an indicator that your teenager is involved in the theft of intellectual property, particularly licensed software.

Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity:

•   "warez" or "w4r3z": Illegally copied software available for download.
•   "h4x": Read as "hacks," or what a malicious computer hacker does.
•   "pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography.
•   "sploitz" (short for exploits): Vulnerabilities in computer software used by hackers.
•   "pwn": A typo-deliberate version of own, a slang term often used to express superiority over others that can be used maliciously, depending on the situation. This could also be spelled "0\/\/n3d" or "pwn3d," among other variations. Online video game bullies or "griefers" often use this term.

Other common leet words:
•   "kewl": A common derivation of "cool."
•   "m4d sk1llz" or "mad skills": Refers to one's own talent. "m4d" itself is often used for emphasis.
•   "n00b," "noob," "newbie," or "newb": Combinations synonymous with new user. Some leetspeekers view "n00b" as an insult and "newbie" as an affectionate term for new users.
•   "w00t" or the smiley character \o/: An acronym that usually means "We Own the Other Team," used to celebrate victory in a video game.
•   "roxx0rs" Used in place of "rocks," typically to describe something impressive.
•   "d00d": Replaces the greeting or addressing someone as a "dude."
•   "joo" and "u": Used instead of "you." This is also commonly written as "j00" or "_|00."
•   "ph": often replaces "f," as in "phear" for "fear" (as in "ph34r my l33t skillz") and vice versa, such as spelling "phonetic" as "f0|\|371(."

Was this information useful? Yes!

[Viin]

And from one of the related links: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/games/learnmore/mmo.mspx

Strange New Gaming Worlds Online
Published: November 10, 2003
Windows Gaming

Computer games have always seemed like a quiet underground, and the news that game revenues have surpassed that of Hollywood came as a surprise to many people. Those people haven't been playing games online lately. The online gaming world is enormous, and it's taking shape as an interesting mirror of some of the ways people interact in the real world. More personal than big public events, more structured than bars and parties, and more subtle than chat rooms, online game worlds have their own economies, social structures, codes of ethics, and even languages.

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games arrived at the turn of the millennium. Since then dozens of manufactures have come to market with massively multiplayer online games; EverQuest, PlanetSide, Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and There have all made a mark. At any given moment, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe are running around in these online universes.

How it All Works

MMO games are a combination of PC games and online social gatherings. The flavors change from game to game—most are more competitive than they are social—but the setup is always roughly the same. When you play a PC game, it fills your whole monitor display, and commands your attention. To play, you go to the store, buy the game, install it on your PC, and away you go. MMO games up the ante by connecting your single PC's game world to Web servers, where lots of people play at once and change the game with their actions. Instead of playing against the computer, or with a handful of friends, you're playing with thousands of people at once. The catch? A small subscription fee, (usually around $10-12 per month) to pay for the servers you connect to.

(picture) A friendly social gathering on Norrath in EverQuest

Game worlds vary widely, but they all offer the chance to create your own character, select a set of skills that will let you make your way in the world, and either take on adventures by yourself or with groups. You might be a soldier in a futuristic war, a character from the Star Wars films, a sojourner in a medieval fantasy world, or a citizen in a more lifelike parallel modern society. You'll control a unique 3-D humanoid that you can craft to resemble you or anyone else you like. With this character, you'll join the war, the adventure, or the rat race—it's up to you, and so is what you do when you get there.

Why it's fun

Every game has its own recipe for entertaining its players, but it boils down to the unpredictability of people in groups. When you play a game with a computer, you can expect it to do the smartest thing in pursuit of victory—small groups of people tend to do the same. MMO games tap in to the random unpredictability of the crowd. Every game has its suspenseful moments where chance and strategy collide and the outcome is uncertain. That tingle of anticipation is what every game company would like to bottle and sell. Letting massive crowds of strangers loose in each other's company heightens the suspense ... especially because the game never really "ends." You just get tired, go to bed, and log back on later to see what happened while you were gone.

(picture) A well-balanced squad moves out for adventure in PlanetSide

What Actually Happens

There's no way to capture a day in the life of any online gaming world. That's like saying "tell me everything that happened to everyone in Chicago today." But let's take a look at what might happen over the course of a few hours in one of the legends of MMO gaming, Asheron's Call.

Asheron's Call takes place in the mystical world of Dereth. Dereth is a world of swords and sorcery, dragons and fair maidens, demons and monsters. Anyone who loves the legends of King Arthur and Camelot can get a mental picture of this world. Dereth features mountains, forests, rivers, seas, towns, and cities. It even has weather, and day and night. You can buy a house of your own, and spend time there with only the friends you invite inside—there you'll be safe from the forces of evil. You can explore the world by yourself and fight monsters, or join with others to explore deadly dungeons and slay foes that no single player could hope to defeat solo. Many of the villains are non-player characters (NPCs); no one controls them but they can "kill" you. This means they can knock you out of the fight, take some of your stuff (swords, wands, medicine), and send you back to where you started. But you can fight head to head with opponents, too. So far, this sounds rather predictable, doesn't it?

The depth of MMO gaming comes from not knowing what everyone else is up to. You might be peacefully gathering in the middle of town, safe from harm, buying supplies for your next journey. Meanwhile, a bunch of guys from Hackensack go down the wrong dungeon and get in over their heads—they anger the wrong people (or maybe not even people). Everyone logged on and hanging out in that town hears the war drums. If your speakers are on you'll know a fearsome army's on the march. Ready or not, you now have no choice but to fight or log off.

Not every game is about conquering the world, though. Adventures, puzzles, cooperative play, and socializing all have their worlds. Asheron's Call and EverQuest combine all of those elements, along with periodic battles between good and evil.

MMO Lingo

There are thousands of chat acronyms and slang terms in the dozens of MMO games, but we've assembled a few of the more common and colorful ones.

•   Aggro: Slang for attack, usually by a hostile creature, and used as both a noun and a verb. If you wander into a hostile creature's "Aggro radius," chances are it will attack you. If you're with a group, usually the stoutest warrior character goes in and takes the first aggro to distract the monster.
•   AoE (Area of Effect): A magic spell or attack that spreads over everything within a given space.
•   Buff: A temporary increase in the powers or abilities of your character.
•   Camp: The place where monsters spawn. Also a verb—if you wait by a spawn point to kill new creatures as they're created, you're "camping" them.
•   Character: The person you control in the game. In many games, you can have more than one, so there might be more characters appearing in the game over time than there are players logging on and off.
•   Con: Short for consider. Most games will tell you how strong an opponent is compared to how strong you are—and whether you have a chance of winning a battle with them. All smart players check this information before a fight.
•   Ding: To gain a level in experience. Players who advance in levels often say "ding" in chat, either to inform their teammates or just to gloat.
•   Experience. The closest thing to keeping score in most MMO games. Dozens of levels of experience await the new player; as you gain experience your character becomes more powerful and can survive more and more grueling events.
•   Group: A temporary assembly of characters, gathered semi-formally to pursue a quest, battle, or puzzle.
•   GTG: Acronym for Good to Go. Means you're ready for whatever's next.
•   Kill stealing: When others are fighting and someone swoops in and kills a dying fighter to gain experience points for the kill, that's kill stealing. Waiting around for easy prey at someone else's expense is bad manners.
•   Loot: In-game items. You can loot items from fallen players in some games, or take the loot from foes after a victory. You can keep the loot if it's something your character can use, or sell the loot for currency to buy something you can use. Used as both a noun and a verb.
•   Mob: Short for Mobile Object. Virtually any computer-controlled creature in the game, especially hostiles. Refers to single creatures rather than a group—plural is "mobs."
•   Newbie: New or inexperienced players, or a character of little experience.
•   NPC: Non-Player Character. Computer-controlled characters in the game. While mobs are technically NPCs since players don't control mobs, when players say "NPCs" they usually mean the neutral characters who sell you goods or give you information.
•   PC: Player Character
•   PK: Player Killer. A player who kills other players. Some games allow this just on certain worlds, some allow it anywhere; in some games it's not relevant.
•   Pop: Short for populate. When creatures spawn or otherwise appear nearby, players say this in chat to sound the alarm.
•   RL: Real Life. What's that?
•   Spawn: Place where a creature appears, or the act of joining the game. Mobs, NPCs, and characters all spawn into the game at some point.
•   Spawn point. The designated location where spawning happens—whether a player has just logged on or a new mob is spawned, it happens at the spawn point. Usually spawn points are widely separated on the map to keep fights from starting too quickly.

Emphasis mine. Those M$ guys are just full of helpful information!

[Bunk]

wtf?

woot is supposed to actualy mean something?
Bah!

[Morfiend]

Just looking at this makes my blood preasure go up, and I want to gouge out my eyes.

[schild]

Catass and Poopsock didn't make that list.

Which appeared about a year ago.

[Strazos]

It's nice to see M$ is trying to bring parents up-to-date...

Oh wait, it's not 1998 anymore.

[Daydreamer]

7 years behind the times is still a decade ahead of most of the rest of the major media.

[Llava]

•   Rules of grammar are rarely obeyed

r0fl

[Triforcer]

7 years behind the times is still a decade ahead of most of the rest of the major media.

Yeah, current articles about video games always seem to start with something like "Liz Smith, 42, is worried about her ten year old son, "Jeff".  Jeff spends ten hours a day playing Doom, a popular computer game.  Congress is beginning to dislike this new phenomenon of "violent" video games (as the Space Invader craze is waning) and probably will regulate."

[Der Helm]

•   RL: Real Life. What's that?

He.

Now, if someone could explain to me what "sup" means, I would be gratefull.

[Rodent]

•   RL: Real Life. What's that?

He.

Now, if someone could explain to me what "sup" means, I would be gratefull.

Obviosuly it's means soup. "sup.. thou?"

I'm highly pissed w00t might actually mean something else than "Yay, beer!".

[Trippy]

Now, if someone could explain to me what "sup" means, I would be gratefull.

It's slang/short form of "what's up?" or "wassup" which is a colloquialism of "how are you?".

[Bunk]

...and if you went to highschool with my friends, that question will immediately evoke the response: "Not me, certainly."

/pointless tangent off

[HaemishM]

You know, somewhere in Redmond, there is a copywriter yearning to be taken seriously as a writer whose soul just died. I imagine said soul committed sepukku when being handed this assignment. I can just picture him with a tattooed tear streaming from each eye as his fingers move furiously over the keyboard, never noticing the toes which are curling around his cubicle mate's letter opener. The foot rises unconsciously behind him, raising the knife and...

baby Jesus wept.

[WayAbvPar]

There are a lot of bars in Redmond to help him/her get through these trying times.

[CmdrSlack]

Not to mention the spring and summer nights where Redhook shows movies on the side of the building and sells beer and stuff.

EDIT -- Assuming that this still happens.

[voodoolily]

I'm just pissed that now my parents know what I'm talking about when I visit chatrooms and talk about porn. Damn you, Microsoft! Damn you all to hell!

\shakes fist, looks to sky in vain

[Mr_PeaCH]

Here's a related and possibly amusing RL tale of how I used 1337speak 4 teh win in the course of providing technical support services to a client recently.

The small company that contracts my services had a need to VPN with another, larger company and this company (we'll call them "Gateway") provided a pre-configured laptop that was to be dedicated at the small company for this purpose.  Ostensibly, my only task was to be working with the Gateway tech sups to configure the necessary ports on this side and test the VPN.  When I got there, however, they had received the computer and had written down what they said they were told the account name and password was but claimed it didn't work.

Account name: administrator
password: d0g3ert

"wtf?" I said to myself.  "They've got the leet speek all wrong.  It should be d0gb3rt" and of course it was.  "pwn3d!" I exclaimed to the n00bler who had misdictated the information.

Actually, I did try to explain to the head honcho at the small company what I had noticed and why the one was obviously wrong... he just shook his head.  We brought his teenage son over to translate and he of course agreed with me.  Dude was more confused than ever after that unfortunately.  I believe he may actually have demanded that I "get off his lawn!" but I probably am embellishing again.

[Strazos]

What kind of fucktard company would give a pre-configured system a leetspeak password?

...Oh wait, you said "Gayway"...nevermind.

[Rodent]

What kind of fucktard company would give a pre-configured system a leetspeak password?

...Oh wait, you said "Gayway"...nevermind.

Hey now, it takes longer to bruteforce d0gb3rt then dogbert... Not very much, but hey atleast it means haxxor CS will be able to haxx it in their mind yo.

Peace.

[HaemishM]

It's common practice to mix numerals and letters in passwords to make brute force password attacks more difficult.

[Yegolev]

Obviously the beginning of the legal asscovering for their upcoming MMO.  Notably, I don't see any "thx la~" which would help differentiate it from EQ significantly.

[Furiously]

It's common practice to mix numerals and letters in passwords to make brute force password attacks more difficult.

*cough* Dictionary attacks *cough*

Brute force doesnt care.

[HaemishM]

I see your logic and raise you a mullet.

[Rodent]

*cough* Dictionary attacks *cough*

Brute force doesnt care.

Now now, your standard brute goes from A to Z then 1-0, so it does take longer.. Maby even a whole 0.1-1 seconds theese days!

EDIT: Well, yes... Bah! Drunk and all that... Just dawned on me it would have to be d0gb3r7/whatever spelling of dogbert with a 7 at the end to actually take more time..... BAH! I miss Turboload. Mr Z was a true haxxor.

[Sogrinaugh]

You know, you'd think writers of password cracking scripts would take this shit into account, thus making it much less effective....
Anaconda
@naconda
@n@conda
@n@c0nda
etc....

not a programmer so i dont know how annoying/difficult making a password crack do that would be, but it seems like it could potentially save alot of CPU cycles (and time) vs a large number of passwords.

[Murgos]

Dictionary attacks do just that.

The people who do this sort of thing trade dictionary's amongst each other (not freely, there is quid-pro-quo and status involved).  Once you have two or three hundred thousand commonly used words and thier common mis-spellings and derivatives there are very few systems that can't be cracked this way.  Particualrly if there is a large user base, because the more users there are the more chance someone has chosen a password already on your list.

These lists also tend to get sorted so that the most commonly encountered words move up and the least common ones move down which makes many cracking attempts absolutely trivial.

And now you know why your sys admin is always giving you crazy rules about how to create your password.

[Evangolis]

When creating important passwords, I generally either took a short phrase, abbriviated it to 8 characters, and converted to Dewdspeak, or tried to create a verbal mnemonic that had a particular beat I could remember when the phone rang at 2AM.

For example, when I was working with several female peers who were being excessively dense for their intellect, I took 'Dizzy Females' and converted it to DzYf3M1Z.

For the other method I would create something like Rbt3ced, which I would break into 3 'syllables' to pronounce in my head.  Unfortunately, this method causes too many of the same set of charatcers to appear, since some of them are easier for me to make rhyme than others.

Mind you, these were interior defensive measures, for protecting servers locally.  Network defenses were keeping administrator privelges local as much as possible, having a good firewall, and monitoring traffic, as well as widespread anti-virus usage, and segmenting networks to limit excessive access and exposure to particular events.  It worked ok, but there was no way to keep people from using the system, and therefore some security breaches were inevitable, because people are idiots.