* Magic is nothing but hacking. ItÂ’s all a matter of knowing the right spell - particularly with Unix commands!
* Wands are just program shells.
* Potions are compiled C programs. A lot of magic compacted into a small container to be used later.
* The Hogwart’s Marauder’s map is nothing but the Unix ‘ps’ command. ‘Ps’, done with switches such as “aux”, will show every running process and who’s running it.
* The Avada Kedavra spell is the kill -9 command. Other unforgivable curses are just heavy-damage commands.
* The Obliviate spell is the equal to ‘rm -rf ./*’.
* The Pack spell is the ‘tar -cf ‘ command.
* The Accio spell is ‘apt-get’.
* The Imperio curse is the Â’sudoÂ’ command.
* The houses are just user groups.
* The Hogwarts Express is a ssh session. At least when entered from platform 9 3/4.
* Lord Voldemort is, of course, a black-hat hacker.
* Hogwarts staff members are system admins. They range from the relatively benevolent wizard Dumbledore to the BOFH nature of Severus Snape.
* Hogsmeade is the Blogosphere.
* The owls are the email network. Note that they continue to resend packets as long as they keep getting dropped, and they can even spam a message!
* The house-elves are daemon processes. TheyÂ’re always working invisibly in the background.
* The Floo Network is the Internet. Complete with an administrative body and special equipment which must be connected to function.
* Muggles are… users! Or more correctly, “lusers”, as a system admin would put it.
* An animagus is just a trojan virus. They can change their appearance to appear innocent while the infiltrate the system.