Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 14:22:31 -0500

From: Gareth Branwyn GarethB2[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM

Subject: Re: Ping of Death



SPAM is good and everything you say is very true. But my pick is the Ping

of

Death. Didn't think the Internet could be so morbid, did you? At first,

this

appears to be a joke or the product of what many of like to refer to as the

"wire-head" culture. However, it is very real and can shut down someone's

network very quickly. Pinging has been around for a while. That's where

you

send a Ping command to a server to see if it is working. This is usually

done

when people are trying to access a site and keep getting error messages.

The

Ping of Death sends a huge amount of bytes, more than a server could

possibly

handle, thereby shutting it down.



Bonnie Briggs

The University of Memphis



This is technically referred to as ping flooding. There is a long tradition

of "death" slang in the computer world. "Blue Screen of Death" (or DSOD) is

another popular term right now. That's the blue screen you get in Windows

when some fatal error is being announced. In Macs, there's the Chime of Death

(or Doom), which is the little tune that plays when your computer has

experienced a serious hardware crash. In hackerdom, there's "eat flaming

death," an exaggerated expression of hostility often used in computer games.

A "dead link," is a WWW link that no longer connects to another page. And one

of my all-time favorites: "wave a dead chicken," which is to perform a number

of ritualistic procedures in the vain hope of reviving ailing or broken

hardware or software. Years ago, I had a computer whose hard drive was very

sick and often wouldn't show up on the monitor when I started the machine. I

found myself putting my hand on the CPU every time I started it, hoping, I

guess, to comfort and encourage it. This is waving a dead chicken.



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