Chronotope’s avatarChronotope’s Twitter Archive—№ 115,493

  1. …in reply to @seldo
    seldo ericlaw So magic cookie refers specifically to a single line of information like constant declarations at the beginning of a file, this idea seems to have reminded people of ticker tape and collided with the cookie file, which was literally a list of single line sayings...
    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
      seldo ericlaw Those sayings were shown at login or logout and usually rotated, like Slack boot messages. Web cookies were originally imagined as set by the browser to init state, similar to the magic cookie setting up data for a program and also a single line...
      1. …in reply to @Chronotope
        seldo ericlaw *set by the server Not 'browser' >.<
      2. …in reply to @Chronotope
        1. …in reply to @Chronotope
          seldo ericlaw God bless Gutenberg for accidentally making a searchable jargon file. You want to really have fun? Servers spell referrer as referer because someone forgot to add the word to the Unix dictionary. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
          OpenGraph image for en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
          1. …in reply to @Chronotope
            seldo ericlaw Also, the format for servers Netscape specified is quite imitative of magic cookies, which also set system states when logged in and in an ssh look particularly more fortune cookie-esqe erikoest.dk/cookies.htm
            OpenGraph image for erikoest.dk/cookies.htm
            1. …in reply to @Chronotope
              seldo ericlaw Oops, wrong jargon cookie link, here's the right one: catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-cookie.html
              1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                seldo ericlaw Always trust The Jargon File. :) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
                OpenGraph image for en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
                1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                  seldo ericlaw There's also the mostly apocryphal virus/prank that was a thing believed to exist for real that they portrayed in Hackers in a very fictionalized form prob mixed in there somewhere, but it is def not preceding those uses. youtu.be/UkGhuXTasQc
                  OpenGraph image for youtu.be/UkGhuXTasQc
                  1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                    seldo ericlaw There's also evidence that someone implied the saying 'you give X, you get a cookie' with describing that return as a 'magic cookie' in describing fseek's functionality. But tbh 'fortune cookie' seems more likely.
                    1. …in reply to @Chronotope
                      seldo ericlaw (hopefully this isn't too 'splain-y, but I do love weird hacker history)


Search tweets' text