Spellbook of finger
| spellbook of + finger 
| |
|---|---|
| Appearance | random |
| Abundance | 1% |
| Base price | 200 zm |
| Weight | 50 |
| Turns to read | 5 |
| Ink to write | 10–19 |
| Spell type | divination |
| Level | 2 |
| Power cost | 10 Pw |
| Direction | directional |
| Equivalent | wand of probing |
- Not to be confused with spellbook of finger of death.
- For the anatomical finger, see body parts.
In NetHack: The Next Generation and SlashTHEM, the spellbook of finger can be read to learn the spell of finger. It is a level 2 divination spell.
In SlashTHEM, the spellbook takes 5 actions to read.
Contents
Generation
In SlashTHEM, spellbooks of finger make up 1⁄100 (1%) of all spellbooks randomly generated on the floor, in general shops or as death drops—second-hand bookstores and rare books stores can also stock spellbooks of finger. Writing a spellbook of finger with a magic marker uses up 10 to 19 charges.
Description
The spell of finger has a similar effect to zapping a wand of probing: successfully casting the spell prompts the player for a cardinal direction to fire the beam in, and any monsters in the path of the beam have their status and inventory revealed, while buried items in squares that the beam passes are revealed, and the contents of statues and containers are shown as well. There are a few significant differences in SlashTHEM, however: the spell will usually anger any peaceful (but not tame) monsters it is cast at, may wake up sleeping monsters and will not reveal the identity of invisible monsters.
Strategy
Once you can cast the spell of finger reliably and have sufficient energy to do so, it can be a decent substitute for the wand of probing or stethoscope when performing maintenance on pets, or else checking the status of hostile monsters. The spell can let you save wand of probing charges for low-energy situations, and can even substitute for a stethoscope in some situations (especially since it does not require that you be adjacent).
Origin
In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information. The Name/Finger protocol is based on Request for Comments document RFC 742 (December 1977) as an interface to the name and finger programs that provide status reports on a particular computer system or a particular person at network sites. The finger program was written in 1971 by Les Earnest, who created the program to solve the need of users who wanted information on other users of the network, which was useful to check the availability of a person to meet and was probably the earliest form of presence information for remote network users. The finger daemon itself (or fingerd) runs on TCP port 79.
The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc. As well as standard user information, finger displays the contents of the .project and .plan files in the user's home directory. Often this file (maintained by the user) contains either useful information about the user's current activities, similar to micro-blogging, or alternatively all manner of humor. Supplying such detailed information as e-mail addresses and full names was considered acceptable and convenient in the early days of networking, but later was considered questionable for privacy and security reasons: Finger information has been used by hackers as a way to initiate a social engineering attack on a company's computer security system, and in 1988 the infamous Morris worm exploited an overflow vulnerability in fingerd (among others) to spread. This is likely part of the reason why using the spell in SlashTHEM angers peaceful monsters that are probed by it (as anyone no doubt would/should be if their privacy was invaded). The protocol has long since fallen out of commonplace use.
Of note is that the naming convention of early protocols such as Finger have their basis in puns and other forms of wordplay and humor: according to some commentary regarding the subject, in the 1970s the term "finger" had a connotation of "is a snitch", making the term a good reminder/mnemonic to the semantic of the UNIX finger command. Additionally, Les Earnest is quoted as naming the protocol for the act of pointing.
