The New Hacker's Dictionary

home machine // n.

1. syn. home box.

2. The machine that receives your email. These senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at home, but reads email at work.

home page // n.

1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term 'home page' is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and physical homes in RL are private, but home pages are designed to be very public.

2. By extension, a WWW repository for information and links related to a project or organization. Compare home box.

honey pot // n.

A box designed to attract crackers so that they can be observed in action. It is usually well isolated from the rest of the network, but has extensive logging (usually network layer, on a different machine). Different from an iron box in that it's purpose is to attract, not merely observe. Sometimes, it is also a defensive network security tactic -- you set up an easy-to-crack box so that your real servers don't get messed with. The concept was presented in Cheswick & Bellovin's book "Firewalls and Internet Security".

hook // n.

A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is a hairy but powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of capabilities (EMACS, for example, is all hooks). The term 'user exit' is synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.