Eric Conspiracy

( n.)

   A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as
   a  sinister  conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987;
   this  was  doubtless  influenced  by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the
   Monty  Python  oeuvre.  There  do indeed seem to be considerably more
   mustachioed  Erics  in  hackerdom  than  the frequency of these three
   traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.
   Well-known  examples  include  Eric  Allman (he of the `Allman style'
   described  under  {indent  style}) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP);
   your  editor  has heard from more than a hundred others by email, and
   the  organization  line  `Eric  Conspiracy  Secret  Laboratories' now
   emanates  regularly  from more than one site. See the Eric Conspiracy
   Web Page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {backbone cabal}]