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Wheel

 
Hacker Slang: wheel wars
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[Stanford University] A period in larval stage during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users.

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Wikipedia: Wheel (Unix term)
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"Wheel war" redirects here. For the policy against wheel warring on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Wheel war.

In computing, the term wheel refers to a user account with a wheel bit, a system setting that provides additional special system privileges that empower a user to execute restricted commands that ordinary user accounts cannot access.[1][2] The term is derived from the slang term big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence.[1] It was first used in this context with regard to the TENEX operating system, later distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s. [2][3]

The term was adopted by Unix users in the 1980s, due to the movement of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix.[2] Modern Unix implementations generally include a security protocol that requires a user be a member of the wheel user privileges group in order to gain superuser access to a machine by using the su command.[4][2][1]

Wheel war

The related term wheel war was used in early hacker culture to refer to system disruption caused by students gaining wheel access in order to log other students out or erase their files, with collateral damage caused to the work of other uninvolved users of the system.[5]

Wheel war is also used by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in its internal operations to refer to a struggle between two or more of the website's administrators in which they undo one another's administrative actions—specifically, unblocking and reblocking a user, undeleting and redeleting, or unprotecting and reprotecting a page.

References

  1. ^ a b c "wheel". Jargon File 4.2.0. Dictionary.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wheel. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
  2. ^ a b c d "wheel bit". Jargon File 4.2.0. Dictionary.com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wheel%20bit. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
  3. ^ "TWENEX". Jargon File 4.4.7. Eric Raymond. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/TWENEX.html. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
  4. ^ Levi, Bozidar (2002). UNIX Administration: A Comprehensive Sourcebook for Effective Systems and Network Management. CRC Press. p. 207. ISBN 0849313511. 
  5. ^ "Wheel War". Jargon File 4.4.7. Eric Raymond. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-wars.html. Retrieved 2008-09-12. 
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Hacker Slang. The Jargon File. Copyright © 2007.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Wheel (Unix term)".  Read more