“Glows” for something tampered with or “glowies”for agents of three letter agencies doing the tampering is an imageboard culture term first coined by Terry Davi

“Glows” for something tampered with or “glowies”for agents of three letter agencies doing the tampering is an imageboard culture term first coined by Terry Davis (1969-2018), the iconic developer of TempleOS, who made the probably fantastical but apparently not metaphorical claim that he could distinguish CIA agents from regular people because CIA agents “glowed in the dark”. After it’s controversial debut on 4chan, Davis’s unsupported claim of selective unexplained human photoluminescence quickly became a meme in imageboard culture. Since imageboard culture is intersectional with software development culture, the terms have worked their way into defacto terminology among a subset of developers that work on things often thought of as adversarial at times to state interests, encrypted chat and cryptocurrency being among these. The term has bled out some and finds spotty support among other developers in tangential contact. The future of the term is uncertain, as it’s use remains largely isolated despite being canonical since 2017.