appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says
the crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two
separate reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out
of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one
late-night login across the network by someone using the login name
`kt'.
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backbone cabal n.

A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the [935]Great
Renaming and reined in the chaos of [936]Usenet during most of the
1980s. During most of its lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes
capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; it was almost
obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to respond "There is no
Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were
speculated on in public.

The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a
decade after the cabal [937]mailing list disbanded in late 1988
following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed
to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper
underground with its power intact.

This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various
Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the
Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that