BEg2 chapter 2 hashslingerz -> hash tags?

[Neal Fultz]

social media around 2000-2001 was basically just Live Journal, which I
think had "tags" but not "hashtags". del.icio.us and flickr
popularized tagging a couple years later.

Twitter made "hash tags" a thing in 2007-2008ish as they started to
move away from SMS, and then really started getting used as a word in
the early 2010s (the hash was chosen as a direct reference to usage on
IRC)
- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=hashtag
- https://buffer.com/resources/a-concise-history-of-twitter-hashtags-and-how-you-should-use-them-properly/

In computer science, a hash function is a "one way function" where it
is easy to calculate in one direction but very difficult to invert.
They are typically used for data structures with fast lookups, digital
signatures for verifying files, and for encrypting passwords.

Typically, servers only store the hash of a password, not the plain
text. To crack a password, you "guess and check" by computing the hash
of every combination of letters and searching for a match, which can
take a lot of computing power or patience. So called "rainbow tables"
exist, which are precomputed tables of clear-text passwords and their
hashes, and the NSA reportedly has a very good cluster for cracking
hashes.

The other common usage is cryptocurrency, where "mining a bitcoin" is
not dissimilar to cracking a difficult password.  For reference, the
bitcoin network calculates around 500 quadrillion hashes per second -
arguably the largest slinger of hashes ever, dwarfing the NSA
(although there is a theory that bitcoin is a psyop).

I still think hashish is a major connotation, though.


On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 9:31 PM Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Could it have anything to do with hash tags?
>
> I’ve forgotten what little I ever knew about hash files and yet don’t they
> come into play in C code, and verifying downloaded executables and files of
> all kinds as well as Twitter?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l