23 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
23 lines
1.4 KiB
Plaintext
ARMM
|
|
|
|
n. [acronym, Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation ] A Usenet cancelbot
|
|
created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to
|
|
automatically cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the
|
|
robot's recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own
|
|
automatically-generated control messages! Transformed by this stroke of
|
|
programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it
|
|
broke loose on the night of March 30, 1993 and proceeded to spam
|
|
news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of over 200 messages. ARMM's
|
|
bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically
|
|
added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This
|
|
produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens
|
|
and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.
|
|
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages
|
|
crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for
|
|
their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as instant Usenet
|
|
history (also establishing the term despew ), and it has since been widely
|
|
cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good
|
|
intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. The Usenet thread on the
|
|
subject is archived here. Compare Great Worm ; sorcerer's apprentice mode.
|
|
See also software laser, network meltdown.
|