Halloween: Do you speak geek?

Are you such a Know-IT-All that it's scary? How many of these terrifying terms can you guess without peeking? Let us know and we'll enter your name in a drawing for a Halloween treat… make your wireless deployments less scary with a copy of Wireless Security by Merritt Maxim and David Pollino, published by McGraw Hill.

Networking

1. White words on a blue background: your system has crashed. Bill Gates encountered this dreaded display at the Comdex trade show when he was demonstrating Windows 98.
What is it?

2. This might sound like they're laying someone in the tomb, but it's really just the conversion of data into ciphertext.
What is it?

3. Project managers shudder to think of it! This nasty phenomenon is the tendency for product or project requirements to increase during development beyond those originally foreseen or planned for.
What is it?

4. You might want to eat a lot of garlic before daring to use this piercing connection on a Thicknet coaxial cable.
What is it?

5. Named for a will-less automaton, this compromised computer is under the control of another, intermittently carrying out a denial-of-service attack on other computers in a network.
What is it?

6. Do tumbleweeds blow through your abandoned site? This is the Web's equivalent to an abandoned town in the Old West.
What is it?

7. This otherworldly creature is said to victimize IRC users, disconnecting them from their channels.
What is it?

8. Although this sounds like a painful way to die, it isn't quite. It's a denial of service (DoS) attack caused by an attacker deliberately sending an IP packet larger than the 65,536 bytes allowed by the IP protocol.
What is it?

9. It's not only a haunting, disembodied spirit -- it's a handy application that can copy the contents of one hard drive to another.
What is it?

10. This underworld denizen is also a program or process that is dormant until a certain condition occurs, when it's summoned up to do its processing.
What is it?

How many could you guess correctly without peeking? Let us know and we'll enter your name in a drawing for a Halloween treat, a copy of Wireless Security!

This was first published in October 2003

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