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.

--------------------------------------------------
Gareth Branwyn
garethb2[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]aol.com, http://home.earthlink.net/~garethb2/

Contributing editor, Wired
Senior editor, bOING bOING
Co-author _Happy Mutant Handbook_ , _Internet Power Toolkit_
Author, _Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati_