Definition of "cruft"

Students “still think of privacy as ‘the one secret I don’t want revealed,’ and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff, of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way, but which aggregates to stuff that they don't want anybody to know,” Moglen said.

2014, Jim Dwyer, quoting Eben Moglen, More Awesome Than Money, Viking, pages 26–27

The document just goes on at length in the same way, picking out the sort of cruft that’s been littering Trump’s Twitter feed since Nov. 3 and tying it all into one stinky package. It’s sincerely not worth running through the entire litany again; simply consider The Post’s Fact Checker articles as an effective rejoinder.

2020, The Washington Post

The PEB includes the list of loaded modules (i.e., the EXE and DLLs), the memory containing environment strings, the current working directory, and data for managing the process’ heaps—as well as lots of special-case Win32 cruft that has been added over time.

2015 , Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, 4th edition, page 908

Best developer practices run the gamut from keeping the cruft out of your code to ensuring your code is accessible to all your application or site’s users.

2015, Shelley Powers, JavaScript Cookbook, Sebastopol: O'Reilly, page 143

Sawyer cites responses to a message saying "there is cruft in [Perl]" as the excuse some Perl community members used to "push him into a corner" until he deactivated his Twitter account.

2021 August 14, Jim Salter, quoting Sawyer X, “The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct enforcement”, in Ars Technica‎