RE: What the heck is "leetspeek?"

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: James Pavlik 

[Try this: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ :)  - WK]

I agree with the spirit of Cecil's remarks, but Leet also confounds
most text recognition software. Like pig Latin, if you cannot
translate on the fly, the information becomes noise.

To text scanners, the entire conversation is broken and garbled, I.E.  
Noise. This is seen as a benefit for those that may have computer
literate parents or others that actually monitor their kids activities
on the net. like pig Latin was cryptography for the sesame street
crowd, rot13 in the early Arpanet/internet days, today's gen( XYZ? )
have "invented" leet.

Once you learn the rules, it is not a mystery, and I am sure that as
we old duffers speak, somebody is coding a l33t5p33k to English
translation programming routine to assist the over 25 crowd and "big
brother" keep up. but for those folks that have to call the kids to
"FIX" the VCR because it is flashing 12:00 again, its perfect. do you
grok it?

James Pavlik



Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html

10-Jan-2003

Dear Cecil:

I have an Armchair University degree in English linguistics, and I was 
thinking about the "l33t5p33k" we see on the Net these days, as well 
as the Princification of the language, the replacement of "you" with 
"u" and "to" with "2," etc. Is this just bad English, or is this the 
next step? Will the English language in 100 years look like the 
rantings of a 15-year-old hacker as we see it now, and will numbers 
become letters (1 = I, 2 = to, 3 = E, 4 = for, 5 = S, etc)? 
--Montfort, via the Straight Dope Message Board


Cecil replies: <SNIP>


Now comes 133t5p33k, proof that the flames of intergenerational 
antagonism burn as brightly as ever. Used mainly by teenage chat-room 
geeks, gamers, and wannabe h4x0r5 (hackers), 133t5p33k replaces 
standard letterforms with others looking vaguely similar, e.g., 1 for 
L, 3 for E, 5 for S, and so on (see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet for a 
rundown). Thus 133t5p33k transliterates to "leetspeek." The 
uninitiated will now ask: What's a leet? It's short for elite, j00 
14m3r (j = Y, 4 = A). No one is sure where the name came from, but the 
meaning is clear enough: Only the elite (i.e., your friends, who are 
definitely not over 40) are supposed to understand it. Leet involves 
multiple layers of coding, the better to trip up the unhip. Thus "you 
are" becomes u r, "the" is purposely misspelled t3h (leetists have 
adopted common typos as a point of pride), K3W1357 means 
kewlest/coolest, w4r3z (wares) is slang for pirated software, and so 
on. 


[...]



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