ARMM

ARMM n.  [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal
   Moderation'] A Usenet robot 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 31, 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.  Compare {Great Worm, the};
   {sorcerer's apprentice mode}.  See also {software laser},
   {network meltdown}.