1337

I celebrated 1337 likes last week. It’s a hacker-speak for “elite”, and a short form of 31337 or l33t. Some kids would speak like that on IRC when I first got online in the late 90s. It was some form of an anti-language, made to obfuscate conversations so that you don’t get autokicked by the bots if you type something silly or hacker-related.

31337 was also the default port for Back Orifice. I was a n00b on IRC in 1998 when a friend sent me this funny .exe. It showed an alert with an okay button that could not be clicked because it’d move around on mouseover. I tried to click the button, failed, terminated it, and deleted the program. To my shock, an experienced IRC user pinged later that day to tell me was pwned. The exe had the Back Orifice trojan and my computer could be remotely controlled. It was hugely embarrassing and taught me a lesson 🙂