For me, the origin of this was from "Smashing the stack for fun and profit (1996)"[1], which does actually refer to somewhat malicious purposes. Apparently it has existed in literature for a long time before that though[2].

[1] http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?id=14&issue=49 [2] http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25205/what-is-the...

Hah, indeed. I had that Aleph One article printed out and stapled, and would carry it with my books in high school!

i agree, but the context nowadays is different. you don't often see articles about modifying the binaries of major operating system kernels.

what impressed me most is that the hack worked flawlessly on one of my 10.8.5 pre-release kernels even though it had not been tested there yet.