Notes on  ARMM 

[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.

J3N Research Labs

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