[humorix] The Internet Collapses! No Film At 11.

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

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Warning:  humorous content ahead.
To prevent overdosage for the sensitive readers, please
take your discussions to humorix-l@nl.linux.org...
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The Internet Collapses!  No Film At 11.
November 25, 2000

Unable to withstand an unexpected deluge of spam,
"meta-spam", off-topic posts, and spontaneous flame wars,
the vast majority of the Internet is currently offline. 
Web-based discussion forums running on Windows NT were the
first to crash under the strain, but within minutes even
Linux and FreeBSD systems were quicking melting under
extreme network conditions 500,000 times worse than the
Slashdot Effect.

It all started on a low-volume humor mailing list when some
evil spammer sent a messag entitled "Make $$$ Fast From
Sending Bulk X-Rated Email! Not MLM!".  Almost every
subscriber sent a response asking, "Why am I getting spam? 
How do I unsubscribe from this list?"  These messages were
immediately followed by more messages demanding, "Why I am
getting all of this meta-spam?  Will everybody please shut
up! And how do I unsubscribe from this thing?"

Under normal circumstances, the flood of messages would
quickly dry up.  But not this time.  One list subscriber
was on vacation and had an auto-responder configured to
respond to each and every email he received.  This set up a
positive feedback loop; within minutes over 10,000
meta-spams, auto-responses, and
meta-meta-meta-auto-responses had circulated through the
list.

Unfortunately, the mailing list administrator was glued to
his cable television watching every movement in the Florida
Election From Hell(tm) and didn't have time to check his
email.  Meanwhile, list members, sick and tired of
receiving 125 messages per second, sent thousands of
messages to other mailing lists asking for help in stopping
mailing list recursion.

It all went downhill from there.  Another evil spammer sent
a message to the list, this time containing a huge list of
To: addresses. The auto-responder responded to every
address on that list, causing several thousand more
netizens to be inundated by meta-meta-messages.  These
people sent knee-jerk responses -- to every address listed
in the meta-spam, of course -- thus creating a virulent
meme that rapidly took on a life of its own.

The torrent of meta-messages propogated at an exponential
rate, spreading across the globe in a matter of
milliseconds.  And then the meme hit Usenet, IRC, and the
Web -- and everything devolved into a state of chaos that
would make South Florida's election woes look like a
picnic.

Servers crashed.  Routers exploded.  Computers burst into
flames. It was not a good day.

Approximately 32.5 minutes from when the first spam message
had been sent, the majority of the Internet was toast.  

And that wasn't the end of it.  After the servers went
down, countless geeks received urgent pages and phone calls
from their bosses demanding to know just what the
[expletive] was happening. Meanwhile, ISP customers, upset
that their Internet access was _down again_, were
frantically trying to call tech support. (Remember, the TV
networks were busy showing arguments over "pregnant chads"
in Florida, so most people weren't aware that the entire
infosphere was on fire.)

These phone calls overloaded the US phone network, which
died a quick death.  It didn't take long for all other
wide-area networks to go kaput, an event that sent most
television and radio stations offline. Indeed, there will
_not_ be a film at 11.

Experts (at least those we were able to contact via smoke
signals) agree that the Internet and other modern
conveniences should be up and running within a matter of
days (or, depending on who you ask, years).  

Said one tech pundit we contacted, "In a way I'm sorta
relieved. I stockpiled thousands of dollars worth of stuff
for Y2K, and now I might be able to actually do something
with it."

"Still," he continued.  "To think that all of this chaos
was caused by one spammer and one errant auto-responder. 
Now that's scary.  And here I thought the collapse of the
Internet would be caused by Y2K -- or at least a bug in
Microsoft software. I never dreamed of this!"

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