Along the same lines of hiding the original message, for several years now, groups of elitist people began to appear that have standardized the use of new languages based on a variant of the classic method of character substitution that we have already recalled. its origin in the written communication of the electronic media. This language was born at the end of the 1980s in the BBS environment, from a mixture of telephony and computer jargon; which has evolved as a more exclusive or private form of communication within some online communities, BBS, and online games, in order to be a script that is not easily understood by outside users, these new languages are known as “LeetSpeak” or simply “Leet” and are highly diffused among the IT elite, hackers, crackers, etc.
As we have seen, this language is highly complex and its functions vary in:
▸The main utility for LeetSpeak is that the most trained or experienced people prevent inexperienced people from reaching the important files.
▸To avoid deletion of files containing illegal material uploaded to servers, such as movies, music.
▸To simply decorate a text. A clear example is the message that is written to display in instant messaging programs.
▸As an alternative to an already occupied nickname, either in a chat or in a forum, a letter is replaced by some set of signs that form it, so that the nickname can be pronounced the same even if different characters have been used.
The use of these languages has increased among young people and the main reason is that they believe that Leet languages help in the protection and security of their messages with an apparent encryption; but unfortunately these text messages that use the substitution of characters for the encryption of a message are vulnerable and very easy to discover since there are tools to find the meaning of these so… in itself it is the opposite of safe.
Check also:
Ook! language – A language to break in laughter
Brainfuck – A big language challenge
