39 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
39 lines
1.8 KiB
Plaintext
flash
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1. n. [Unix] A little program intended to quickly turn a user's
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terminal display into garbage by sending VT-100 escape characters
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over the network, forcing a user to logout.
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In 1990s, most Unix systems were owned by institutions and timeshared
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among users. A talk daemon (talkd, ntalkd, walld) on these systems allowed
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users to exchange short messages on terminals, locally or over the network
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from another system. "flash" exploited it to send escape characters, and
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was a common instrument for pranks and in-fights on MUD and IRC, and a major
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nuisance at that time.
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For examples in source code, see https://seclists.org/bugtraq/1994/Jul/16 and
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http://phrack.org/issues/47/4.html (grep "flash").
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2. v. [Unix] The act of sending unsolicited escape sequences to disrupt
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a user's terminal. When the terminal is incapacitated, that's to say a
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user "gets flashed".
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It was commonly exploited via talkd using the "flash" program, but
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originally used in finger (via ~/.plan), and achievable everywhere where
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escape sequences are accepted, such as mail clients (via emails) and
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ZModem.
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3. n. Adobe Flash, a deprecated multimedia software by Adobe. Despite
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millions of web games based on it, and widespread use for animation
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and videos in web pages, it has performance issues, especially for
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video playbacks, and infamous in the hacker community for numerous
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security vulnerbilities and its use in online advertising popups.
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It faced a backlash when Steve Jobs refused to allow it in Apple's
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iOS products, and gradually fallen into disuse in favor of HTML 5 and
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JavaScript.
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4. n. Flash memory, a solid-state non-volatile data storage medium.
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It's used universally in USB drives, mobile and embedded devices.
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It has became an alternative over the classical mechanical data
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storage medium since 2010s due to its advantage of being fully
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electronic without moving parts and fallen price. |