The Meow Wars is often considered one of the largest Usenet flame wars of all time. It started on the newsgroup alt.fan.karl-malden.nose and spread throughout the alt.* hierarchy, the so-called "Big 8" groups, and out to the wider Internet, lasting for over one year. The original Meowers were denizens of alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead who responded to the January 9, 1996 "invasion" staged by Harvard students from alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. Once the Harvard students abandoned alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, it became the Meowers' base of operations for what they called their "UseNet Performance Art". Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... This article is about the Internet meaning of the word flaming. For other meanings, and meanings of the word flame, see Flame. ... A newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ... The hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with , organized hierarchically. ... The Great Renaming was a restructuring of Usenet newsgroups that took place in 1987. ... January 9 is the 9th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...

The Meowers

The unique speech patterns of Henrietta Pussycat were the inspiration for Usenet meowing.

There was no formal Meower organization, and frequently little communication among participants. Actions described here were carried out by individuals who chose to identify themselves as Meowers, but some were acting on their own. Likewise, some innocent bystanders were incorrectly identified as Meowers and dragged unwillingly into the fray. This work is copyrighted. ...

One distinctive hallmark of the Meowers' posting activity was the "cascade," in this instance a large number of messages and replies posted in rapid succession, and typically spread among large numbers of newsgroups. [1] These messages frequently contained the word "meow" and other feline references, all indirectly mocking a series of parodies of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood character Henrietta Pussycat that had been posted by the students. [2] These references were the reason for the "Meower" appellation. Their tactics won them both converts and enemies, and the annoyance of many Usenetters. Mister Rogers Neighborhood was a childrens television show created and hosted by Fred Rogers which was produced by Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania public broadcaster WQED and Rogers not-for-profit production company (originally Small World Enterprises prior to 1971). ...

Escalation

As the Meowers spilled over into more newsgroups, reactions varied. Some experienced Usenetters would place the word "meow" and names of commonly seen Meowers into personal filters known as killfiles. This would often lead to the practice of "morphing," where some Meowers would repeatedly alter their message headers and text to remain visible. This also lent the impression that Meowers were greater in number than was the reality. Some users with less capable software, or simply an inclination to fight back, would attempt to engage the Meowers with threats, complaints or insults. In response, the Meowers would use tools like Deja News to find their favorite newsgroups and invade them as well. A kill file (also killfile or bozo bin) is a per-user file used by some Usenet reading programs (originally Larry Walls rn) to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or other header lines. ... The Deja News logo as it appeared in 1997. ...

The Meowers did not restrict their activities to Usenet. Since most Usenet posters generally still used their real electronic mail addresses when posting (e-mail spam had not yet become a major problem), it was relatively easy to flood mail accounts with thousands of nonsense messages, typically via anonymous remailers. To increase the mayhem, the mail messages were constructed so that they appeared to originate from other people. The mail systems at Boston University and other area colleges were rendered inoperable by one of these floods. Electronic mail, abbreviated e-mail or email, is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. ... View of a modern spam email, containing an advertising image. ... An anonymous remailer is a server computer which receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and which forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. ... For the unrelated Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, see Boston College. ...

Another Meower, or at least a willing co-conspirator of the Meowers, was Grillo the Clown, who insisted that his epic-length crosspostings of obscene surrealist rants were not only performance art, but that they were protected by Grillo's right to free speech. Grillo also maintained that his gibberish was absolutely not off-topic to the subjects of the various newsgroups, and that his postings, however incomprehensible, were his heartfelt and valid statements regarding each of those topics. Grillo, it is said, was eventually traced to his favorite terminal in the computer lab of the University of Kentucky library and was banned from it permanently. Performance art is art where the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time, constitute the work. ... Freedom of speech is the right to freely say what one pleases, as well as the related right to hear what others have stated. ... The University of Kentucky (also as UK or simply Kentucky) is a public, co-educational university located in Lexington, Kentucky. ...

In yet another series of incidents attributed to Meowers (or, at least, to parties claiming to be such), floods of forged control messages (special articles that are used to control news servers) caused the creation of hundreds of oddly-named newsgroups to appear at many locations. This occurred shortly after Fluffy the Cat—a parody[3] of a Harvard student's[4] pet [5] and self-proclaimed owner of Usenet—announced the creation of news.admin.cascade.[6][7] The control flood prompted the widespread adoption of digital signatures to verify the authenticity of such messages. The signing software had been made available after a similar earlier incident, but the scale and repetition of these later attacks was unprecedented. A news server is a set of computer software used to handle Usenet articles. ... Digital signature (or public-key digital signature) is an encryption scheme for authenticating digital information that should not be confused with ordinary physical signatures on paper or with an electronic signature, but implemented using techniques from the field of public-key cryptography. ...

Countermeasures

In an attempt to restore order, certain of the people who were already in the habit of sending cancel messages (automated deletion requests) against spam added many of the Meower postings to their target lists, and demanded that Meowers' service providers disconnect them. The most passionate anti-Meower of these "despammers" was Stanley J. Kalisch III. The results of these measures were mixed, as not all servers accepted cancel messages and there were many servers (often inadvertently) open for posting if one's regular access was terminated. Newsgroup spam is a type of spamming where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. ...

Kalisch III then declared a limited form of Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) when he became offended by what he termed "spammed cascades." He initially targeted several posting addresses,[8] followed by the first-ever UDP of a specific person, Raoul Xemblinosky (also known as Bufford L. Hatchett and other names).[9] Previously, UDP actions were reserved for servers. Although Kalisch III claimed that his unprecedented personal UDPs were intended to have a limited scope, he later declared UDPs on four other Meowers. Although Kalisch III claimed his UDPs were suspended for technical reasons, heated discussions in news.admin.net-abuse.usenet forced Kalisch III to accept that in Usenet's unmoderated public newsgroups, wholesale cancellation of any individual's postings was an unconscionable violation of free speech. The other "despammers" held that a UDP would not be effective in convincing a provider to change its policies, and violated the principle that abuse control should be content-neutral. Moreover, as Usenet aged, and the morphing of e-mail addresses and de-facto handles evolved, Kalisch III's penchant for declaring UDPs against individuals became technically unfeasible. On Usenet, the Usenet Death Penalty (or UDP) is a final penalty that may be issued against Internet service providers or single users who produce too much spam. ... A screenname is a name or string of characters chosen to uniquely identify a user within an online system, including dial-up bulletin board systems, platform videogame servers, and Internet-based environments. ...

While abuse of anonymous remailers and open news servers was long recognized as a nuisance, the activities of Meowers led some to a wider belief that it was a threat. Some anonymous remailers were modified so that news posting was restricted, and many open servers were closed. These efforts would be redoubled later when actual spammers and other vandals began to mimic Meower tactics. The most notable of these vandals was Hipcrime, who flooded many groups with senseless posts constructed using a steganography filter. HipCrime is both an anonymous Usenet vandal and the eponymous method he devised. ... Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured. ...

Another development that helped to curb Meower activity was server-side article filtering. Limitations could be placed on combinations of newsgroups, posting rates, and other article characteristics. Unlike cancels, server-side filtering only affects the servers on which it is installed... a far more elegant and less-legally-challengeable solution to spam, real or perceived, than arbitrary, unilateral imposition of a pointless UDP.

Aftermath

While the original Meowers, for the most part, moved on to other things (including, in some cases, network administration) or left Usenet altogether, imitators have perpetuated similar posting activity as late as 2004, albeit on a smaller scale. Newer media, such as Web-based bulletin boards, are designed with central control, more effective moderation facilities, and finer control over posting activity to help prevent conflagrations of this type. 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Gaia Online, the largest English language forum-based community as of April 2005 — powered by a modified version of phpBB. An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. ...

See also

• Internet troll
• Flame war
• alt.romath

In Internet terminology, a troll is someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion (see Anonymous Internet posting). ... This article is about the Internet meaning of the word flaming. For other meanings, and meanings of the word flame, see Flame. ... alt. ...

External links

• The History of the Empire of Meow, by the 2-Belo - An account of the Meow Wars from the perspective of the "Meow" faction.
• Ron Schell's criticism of The One True History Of Meow - Another account, more sympathetic to the students.
• Another account of the Meow Wars, courtesy of Tim Young (Dartmouth '96, GWU Law '99) - A relatively impartial but detailed chronological summary of the events.
• Raoul Xemblinosky's home page - A set of stories related to "Usenet Performance Art."