[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.
