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ice


ice: [coined by USENETter Tom Maddox, popularized by William
   Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for `Intrusion
   Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels,
   software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literally kill
   the intruder).  Also, `icebreaker': a program designed for
   cracking security on a system.

Neither term is in serious use yet as of mid-1993, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the future. In the meantime, the speculative usage could be confused with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit emulator".