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25 lines
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>OS and JEDGAR</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="appendixa.html" title="Appendix A. Hacker Folklore"/><link rel="previous" href="koans.html" title="Some AI Koans"/><link rel="next" href="story-of-mel.html" title="The Story of Mel"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">OS and JEDGAR</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="koans.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Appendix A. Hacker Folklore</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="story-of-mel.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="os-and-jedgar"/>OS and JEDGAR</h2></div></div><div/></div><p>This story says a lot about the ITS ethos.</p><p>On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was
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being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output
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by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was
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called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science world (and at IBM too)
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OS means ‘operating system’, but among old-time ITS hackers it
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almost always meant ‘output spy’.</p><p>OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of
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‘protection’ that prevented one user from trespassing on another's
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areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would
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automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It worked
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in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the operating system to
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see if anyone else was looking at the insides that had to do with your output.
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This ‘counterspy’ program was called JEDGAR (a six-letterism
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pronounced as two syllables: <span class="pronunciation">/jed´gr/</span>), in honor of the former head
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of the FBI.</p><p>But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for ‘license to
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kill’. If the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually gun the job of
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the <a href="L/luser.html"><i class="glossterm">luser</i></a> who was spying. Unfortunately, people found
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that this made life too violent, especially when tourists learned about it.
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One of the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with another
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program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long time to do this,
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because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this day no one knows how
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many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been defanged.</p><p>Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as of
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late 1999 — in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us
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whether the name is tribute or independent invention.</p></div><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="koans.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="appendixa.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="story-of-mel.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Some AI Koans </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> The Story of Mel</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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