frogging

(University of Waterloo) 1. Partial corruption of a text

file or input stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as

opposed to random events like line noise or media failures.

Might occur, for example, if one bit of each incoming

character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were

correct and others were not.

See terminak for a historical example.

2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where

the output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather

than conventional ASCII. This often happens, for example,

when using a terminal or comm program on a device like an IBMPC with a special "high-half" character set and with the

bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently familiar

with ASCII bit patterns might be able to read the display

anyway.

[Jargon File]