February 12, 2001– Newsletter #117

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

Did you hear…

The FTC is becoming pro-active. The latest report is that the U.S.
governmental agency found 200 firms, 175 on the Internet, that
have offered to collect data and sell to third party sources. That’s
illegal. The FTC calls their efforts “Operation Detect Pretext”.
Look for action to be taken soon.

EBay is cracking down on people sending SPAM to bidders. I’ve
received a few letters this way. Right now, any registered user can
get the email address of just about any other person on the eBay
system. The company plans to put a stop to the practice by hiding
their user’s addresses. Email will be forwarded by the eBay
servers while keeping the user’s actual email address a secret.

Another dot-com is about to go under completely. Greenlight.com
will soon be gobbled up by CarsDirect.com. All remaining 75
Greenlight employees will be out of a job.

Even military camouflage is going digital. Soon, military personal
will be wearing camouflage that is made of up pixels. Up close it’s
a grainy look, but from a distance, it’s said the suits blend into the
scenery much faster. The new designs will be tested at bases in
Japan and California. It is expected to become general issue by the
summer.

Now onto today’s topic…

k4|| ‘/0u |234d 7|-|15?

1F ||07, 7|-|3|| ‘/0u d0||’7 u||d3|2574||d 133t.

The lines above are not just gibberish. It’s a new, and really fun,
method of writing text on the Web. It’s called “l33t”. If you can
read and write l33t, then you’re a good “cyber freak”. You also
play computer games. That’s where the majority of the formatting
rules grew from, those who play games communicating with one
another.

The text above reads:

“Can you read this? If not, then you don’t understand l33t.”

The new format is actually pretty clever, and contrary to what you
might think has grown into a rather well constructed group of
rules.

The overall concept is to find interesting methods of using
differing ASCII characters to represent the more common letters.
The decisions regarding which letters and/or symbols to use are
decided both by letter structure and phonetic pronunciation. Let’s
look at just the first word:

“k4||”

That’s the word “can”. It’s fairly easy to pick out that the “C” was
replaced by a “K” because of phonetic equality. The “A” is
replaced by the number four due to similar structure. The “N” is
replaced by an equal structure formed out of three other ASCII
characters.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s clever. I can’t imagine
ever writing like this all the time, but for a short mental get-away,
I’m enjoying the time I’m spending attempting to understand it.

Here are the basic rules:

The vowels “A” “E” “I” and “O” are substituted using the numbers
4, 3, 1, and 0.

The letter “G” is replaced with the number 9.

As with any language, there are characters, or sounds, that have
more than one substitution. For example, the letter “T” is most
commonly seen as a 7, but many also use “+”.

So, using just those rules, we would write the sentence, “We all
must go” this way:

W3 411 mu5+ 90

As I said above, not only are characters replaced due to physical
appearance, but also due to phonetic pronunciation. We saw above
that the “K” sound is always written with a “K” simply because of
the sound even if the correct English spelling is with a “C”.

The most common example of a sound being more important than
the correct letter(s) is the word “fat”.

In the world of l33t, to call a fellow cyber freak “fat” is the highest
compliment. The thing is, “fat” does not mean overweight. The
term came from rap music. There, the term was spelled “phat”.
That’s another example of changing the characters in order to
equal the sound.

In l33t, “phat” has a few different spellings. Following the rules of
l33t, I can come up with four different spellings that all equal the
same word:

“ph4t”
“ph4+”
“p|-|4+”
…and the most common “ph@”

Yes, you can jumble the letters around and come up with a few
more, but I felt these four were truly different without a simple
jumbling. Each uses a new character.

Notice the @ insignia is used as it is to be pronounced. There’s
another character that is used in the same manner, “#”. You use
that pound sign when you want to represent the sound “ash”. The
word “crash” would be written “cr#”. The example I found most
interesting was the word “backslash”. In true l33t that word is
written:

84ck51#

Notice the number 8 being used for the letter “B”.

At this point, you can speak basic l33t. However, there are some
quite advanced word constructions that require you to really be an
expert in this format. Those who can follow even the most
complicated l33t are called, “3l33t”. Pronounce that “elite”.

Those who write in 3l33t have actually broken l33t into dialects.
The dialects often represent differing groups of people separated
by their interest in one computer game or another. Furthermore,
they make a concerted effort to use as few true characters as
possible. If it can be done, every single letter is replaced with a
new character or series of characters.

Here are a few I found interesting. A couple you’ve already seen:

H = |-|
K = |<
L = |_
M = ^^
N = ||
R = |2
V = /
W = //
Y = ‘/

If it’s all way too confusing for you, a cyber freak named Rio has
offered a very well written site regarding the new “language”. In
addition, there is actually a l33t translation script. You put in
English and it spits out l33t.

You’ll find it at:
http://www.planetquake.com/turkey/l33translate.htm

I doubt many of you will enjoy this past the end of the newsletter.
It’s fun just to enjoy it for what it is. However, there are people in
my field, Communications, that will love this and study it to the
Nth degree.

Languages evolve and often the goofy words and sentence
structures you hear your kids using are not just what are considered
“poor” English mistakes. It’s often a dialect that has a serious set
of rules. Just as using a plural noun with a singular verb can get
stares in your English class, using “incorrect” structure in l33t can
get you the same wondering glances online.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

7|-|47’5 7|-|47. 7|-|4|||<5 F0|2 |234d1||9 1 |23411'/ 4pp|2351473 17.

(That’s that. Thanks for reading. I really appreciate it.)

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And remember: Statistically speaking (based upon historical
records), it is ten times easier to hit a hole in one than to bowl a
300 game. The odds for each generally round out to 300,000 to 1
vs. 30,000 to 1.