There's one question which has been bothering me for months:

November 20, 2000 3:15 PM

There's one question which has been bothering me for months: How do you pronounce "L33T" and what the heck does it mean?
posted by Steven Den Beste (28 comments total)

leat, short for elite.
posted by thirteen at 3:18 PM on November 20, 2000

"Leet" as in "elite." It's a dumb monicker for script kiddies that think they are the all knowing lords of the internet. I think it's safe to say that l33t.com is sarcastic. If it isn't, I feel bad for anyone who's name is remotely attached to it.
posted by tomorama at 3:19 PM on November 20, 2000

See the fact that I posted 3 minutes after this thread appeared proves that I am L33t, where tomorama posted 4 minutes after (that extra minute is 1 half hour in internet time) means he dr00lz.
Now everybody e-mail me your credit card numbers and nobody gets hurt.
posted by thirteen at 3:24 PM on November 20, 2000

But my user ID is 727, while yours, thirteen and tomorama, are the laughably b3lated 920 and 1396, r3sp3ct1vly. (oh, rats, steven's got 522..)
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:29 PM on November 20, 2000

& that l33t tutorial iz dead on funny.
posted by sonofsamiam at 3:32 PM on November 20, 2000

Next week on MetaFilter: an in-depth analysis of how many "l33t hax0rs" claim to "0wn j00" and a brief discussion on the history of the expression "w00t"....
posted by youhas at 3:37 PM on November 20, 2000

I've been meaning to write to Matt about auctioning off some of those mysterious unused -100 numbers. When I first showed up here people were talking about how Metafilter was being ruined by too many newly arrived people, and thusly I have always been ashamed of my high number.
I lurked for a few weeks, ruining my chances to be user 666, I will never forgive myself.
posted by thirteen at 3:44 PM on November 20, 2000

If you were truly l33t, you would hax0r your way into MetaFilter and make yourself one of those unused 100 numbers. I lurked way too long to even think about getting a lower number. So I hold my head in shame, knowing that I will never own j00 or ne1z else on here.
posted by Arvid at 3:49 PM on November 20, 2000

I have a subscription to 2600, how could I possibly be any more l33t than that.
But then again, I also have a subscription to KoDT, which might cancel it out.
posted by thirteen at 3:54 PM on November 20, 2000

1 w4ll h4X0R u!!!!!!!!!!
posted by capt.crackpipe at 4:16 PM on November 20, 2000

crackpipe: That site is just too blatant to be good satire. But it's funny anyway. Hehe. I never understood why they'd put an "X" in haX0r.
posted by Succa at 4:43 PM on November 20, 2000

A lot of this started with the 80's pirate scene. You were either and elite trader or a lame leech. It devolved nicely.
posted by john at 4:45 PM on November 20, 2000

how to h4x0r th3 g1850n
posted by Hackworth at 5:01 PM on November 20, 2000

Speaking l33t saves lives.
posted by darukaru at 5:20 PM on November 20, 2000

1 g0t r3wt 0n 4ll j00r b0x0rs. muhahahahahaa

1 0wn j00r 4$$ lik3 4 th4il4nd wh0r3!


posted by PWA_BadBoy at 5:36 PM on November 20, 2000

Hey, Thirteen: how much will you pay for my user#?
posted by lileks at 7:19 PM on November 20, 2000

JeffK's latest article on DirectX8 has to be the funniest bit in a damn while. Lowtax never fails to please. :)
posted by pnevares at 7:51 PM on November 20, 2000

I remember that sort of hax0r speak going on way back to the late 80's BBS days... It really started to take off during the IRC heydays when there was no mIRC... no Windows clients, no AOL people at all. People actually wrote scripts that converted text to this crap.
posted by Dean_Paxton at 8:25 PM on November 20, 2000

Actually, that site is 100% satire.

IRCnews is a totally satirical site that pokes fun of IRC and the 3l33t wannabes that populate it.
posted by da5id at 8:51 PM on November 20, 2000

wannabe 3l33t?


posted by dangerman at 9:10 PM on November 20, 2000

I'm still irritated over the finger-wagging "tsk tsk tsk" I got from the nerdy salesguy at Barnes and Noble when I bought a copy of 2600 recently. He proceeded to give me this ten-minute lecture on the evils of hacking and how "some guy I know does this shit all the time and that's his claim to fame." Duh. But you know deep down he was jealous of his l33t friend. I saw that DVD of Hackers he was trying to hide behind his shelf.

As one who finds IRC an oddly amusing tool from time to time, I appreciate the link to ircnews.com -- hadn't heard of that one before, and enjoyed it thoroughly.
posted by evixir at 11:12 PM on November 20, 2000

You have to checkout detonate.net and hackernetwork.com for good 1337 parody-check out the movie bastardizations.
posted by dcodea at 1:42 AM on November 21, 2000

sort of side note: i remember reading somewhere ages ago that a lot of the leet-speak came about because software companies would supposedly have spiders that would crawl ftp sites looking for their program's names. So, if you wrote M1cros0ftW0rd.zip or whatever, there was less chance of your site getting shut down. This was back when anonymous ftp was the big way to get pirated stuff.

I have doubts whether that is the real origin, in fact I'm pretty sure it isn't, but I think the origin might be related to that, there may have been a real use for the spelling at one time.
posted by beefula at 1:47 AM on November 21, 2000

I remember early 90s BBSers (myself included :-) remapping their keyboards to use various high ascii characters in place of normal letters. Many people had different mappings, and because of the mapping I ended up learning almost the complete ASCII chart.

I've (thankfully) forgotten everything except 'A' (65) from which I'm able to calculate the rest. :-)
posted by cCranium at 5:59 AM on November 21, 2000

beefula -- I'd heard the "writting" was started by a person back in the BitNet days. See The Jargon File. I think it evolved from there... As for FTP -- not that I know anything *cough* -- if you wanted to hide from those crawlers you might put your f1lez in a directory with a few spaces (we're talking DOS4.0 days here) and/or with control-charaters in the name. Doing that stuff also made for passwords which were close to being unbreakable from the brute force crackers.
posted by jwells at 8:27 AM on November 21, 2000

B1FF R00LZ!!1!
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:03 AM on November 21, 2000

Your B1FF style is quite good, but your L33T moves will not save you from my fist of death punch style.
posted by plinth at 11:29 AM on November 21, 2000

Last post!!!
posted by baylink at 1:56 PM on November 21, 2000