larocque6689
February 27th, 2004, 04:54 AM
A friend passed this to me via PM about two months back and I thought I'd post it.
Meow meow meow meow...
http://www.xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.txt
===========================================================
====================================
the following article is found at the following URL on 2001-11.
http://member.newsguy.com/~shpxurnq/meow.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The One True History of Meow
By The 2-Belo
The Meow Wars The largest flame war in Usenet history, involving hundreds of
people from over 80 newsgroups, lasting over forty-five weeks. It was the
Usenet equivalent of World War II. It was The Flamewar to End All Flamewars.
It was the best of times.The Meow Wars It all began innocently enough: a
small group of students at Harvard University - a band of future
bloodsucking ambulance-chasing lawyers, medical specialists who phone in
diagnoses from mobile phones on yachts, and caffeine-crazed computer
programmers with way too much time on their hands - began to use Usenet as a
local dorm room bulletin board/gossip clique area.
The newsgroup they chose, apparently at random from among the hundreds of
empty Usenet joke-newsgroup wastelands: alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. [The
circumstances surrounding the birth of this newsgroup can now be told,
thanks to the location of the original newgroup control message.]
This small group of posters set up their little regime in this forgotten
newsgroup, posting daily schedules and post count summaries, talking about
this class and that event and this and that and the other. Eventually, they
tired of posting articles about their immensely boring daily lives, so they
turned their attention to the computer network world around them. First they
tried their hand at penny-ante crossposting, branching out to claim other
empty newsgroups, such as alt.fan.ok-soda and alt.fan.pooh. This soon grew
stale as well, as each poster moved into a new group only to find the same
bored people he/she left behind.
Apparently as a result of the Ivy-League uppity belief that all the world
should be like them (and also as a result of trying to avoid studying for
exams), one of the posters suggested that they "invade" a real, populated
newsgroup and "rile up the stupid people". When Matt Bruce, another of the
Harvard band, heard this, he wrote this response:
"I suggest that we start either posting or crossposting to
alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. I also suggest that we use big words and perfect
grammar, and refuse to write as the young ruffians in question speak.
"This could lead to some interesting 'dialogue.' "
This article was posted directly to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. The regulars
at that group, wondering what the world was coming to, scoffed at the notion
of a couple of stuck-up geeks from Harvard calling them "ruffians", and a
few unpleasantries were exchanged. This crosspost-tossing attracted the
attention of an unknown poster going by the name of Dontonio Wingfield.
He/she discovered that one of the Harvard posters, Chuck Truesdell, placed
"meow meow" (a reference to Henrietta Pussycat of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
fame) in many of his posts as a sort of calling card, as his initials spell
"C.A.T.". Matt Bruce picked up on this practice for one post (the quote at
the top of this page), and someone, for some reason, took that article out
of afk-mn, crossposting it to a dozen newsgroups as a troll against the
"Nosers" (as the Harvard students called themselves). Dontonio Wingfield
either instigated this troll, or was the first to reply to it:
"What the hell is this felgercarbe? Would you mind keeping it the hell out of
HERE?"
The Dontonio Wingfield persona then, of course, vanished. The posters in the
targeted groups, noting the "meow meow" elements, began to retaliate against
the supposed original crossposter, Matt Bruce. These posters entered the
'Nose and found it full of other Harvard students like Matt, and the
counter-invaders flamed and spewed "meow" with vigor, In time, flames
containing the word "meow" would start popping up all over the place, aimed
mostly at areas where the high-class uppity Ivy-League snots were known to
congregate, such as alt.college.college-bowl. Other flames targeted snobbish
college kids who regularly huffed their freckled noses in newsgroups such as
alt.music.nin. Some of the more daring souls decided to forge articles in
Bruce's name, spreading the "meow" attacks to more and more groups,
including afk-mn, to add to the onslaught against him and his
"intellectually elite" cohorts.
When the real Matt Bruce caught wind of the uproar, he and the other Harvard
students first tried to write his attack on atbnb as a "joke". When no one
bought his story, he attempted more forcefully to get the attackers to stop,
which only sounded like more condescending talk:
"Please stop. Cease and desist. You are only making yourselves look silly."
When this only fanned the flames further, he threatened to cancel all
articles containing the word "meow", and to netcop all the "meow" article
forgers. This "Cancellation Notice", posted about a month and a half after
the first "meow" troll, was apparently the proverbial last straw. A person
crossposting into 12 newsgroups, then claiming it a "joke", when he
obviously had no sense of humor? This pissed off the Usenet Performance
Artists to no end. it was time to teach Matt Bruce - and the rest of his
gang of snots - a lesson. Suddenly, afk-mn, alt.college.college-bowl, and
scores of other groups were flooded to the gills and beyond with hundreds
upon hundreds of huge meow articles from all corners of Usenet. Cascades,
ASCII cats, hundred-line "meow" hello-world-type flood posts, and more were
posted, reposted, munged, pureed, and regurgitated all over the servers of
the world. The Harvard kids' protests were quickly lost in the feline tidal
wave. Every post by a Harvard snot would result in fifty cascade follow-ups.
alt.college.college-bowl, a known regular haunt of Matt Bruce, was reduced
to a smoldering crater, so inundated with meows that its regulars could no
longer use it. After a couple of weeks of this, Usenet in general looked
like Chernobyl, or the Marina district of San Francisco after the 1989
earthquake, or downtown Nagasaki the day after the fall of the Fat Man.
A number of the attackers, calling themselves the "MEOW MEOW ARMY", were
bent on taking over afk-mn and occupying it as their own. It soon was - the
Harvard students, seeing a fire raging out of control in their cyber Dunster
House, were compelled to escape to a local, non-propagated newsgroup on a
Harvard server.The meow hurricane, however,simply refused to die:
alt.college.college-bowl continued to be attacked until almost a year after
Matt Bruce's now infamous post, and the Meowers now in afk-mn began to
redecorate their new home (with the legendary Fluffy, formerly Matt Bruce's
pet, claiming ownership of all of Usenet), merging with the verbal abuse
powerhouse known as the Mighty Alt Dot FlameTM.
Today, afk-mn remains as a sort of Usenet posting relay hub. The first- and
second- generation Meowers also became alt.flame regulars. Other bases of
Usenet Performance Art, such as alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk,
alt.non.sequitur, and alt.stupidity, long bases of Meow action, also traded
regulars with the Nose. These groups fused together to form what is now
known as the Empire of Meow.
This empire is still growing as you read this, as in 1998 the groups
alt.flame.niggers and demon.local were recently annexed much in the same
fashion as the 'Nose. There are hundreds of groups throughout the alt.*
heirarchy who have at least heard of the Meow movement... every so often, a
troll warning will be posted to these groups, sometimes even warning the
inhabitants about elements that the Empire has nothing to do with:
"You will be able to recognize a troll and an impending invasion from
alt.syntax.tactical by cascades, numerous appearances of the word 'meow',
and crossposts to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose..."
Also, throughout its lifetime, the actions of the Empire have seemingly
become a convenient scapegoat for real Usenet abuses. In February of 1997,
several inhabitants of the 'Nose were placed under a Usenet Death Penalty,
or UDP, for over a week by a certain self-made Usenet "spam canceller". The
crime: cascades. Also, in 1998, Meow became the whipping boy for those
persons who wanted a UDP imposed on Altopia News Service, which many Meowers
use to post to Usenet, because of the few Altopia users who were committing
blatant acts of abuse such as mailbombing and post flooding. These accusers
were wont to include relatively harmless acts of off-topic crossposts and
cascades in with the real problems. Apparently, there will always be those,
like the Harvard kids, who will not tolerate the right that all Usenetters
have to act silly, or to have a sense of humor, or to have the view that
nothing should be taken too seriously. It should, however, be noted that
without the existence of tight-sphinctered conservative snots, there would
be no Meow in the first place. Hated or not, it would thus seem that the
phenomenon known as MEOW, and its practitioners known as MEOWERS, have
forever carved their place among the legends of Usenet, along with the likes
of Kibology and the first MMF chain letter. Clealy, sir, the Empire of
Meow's feline vocalizations will be heard forever more throughout Usenet
history.
Meow.
Meow meow meow meow...
http://www.xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.txt
===========================================================
====================================
the following article is found at the following URL on 2001-11.
http://member.newsguy.com/~shpxurnq/meow.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The One True History of Meow
By The 2-Belo
The Meow Wars The largest flame war in Usenet history, involving hundreds of
people from over 80 newsgroups, lasting over forty-five weeks. It was the
Usenet equivalent of World War II. It was The Flamewar to End All Flamewars.
It was the best of times.The Meow Wars It all began innocently enough: a
small group of students at Harvard University - a band of future
bloodsucking ambulance-chasing lawyers, medical specialists who phone in
diagnoses from mobile phones on yachts, and caffeine-crazed computer
programmers with way too much time on their hands - began to use Usenet as a
local dorm room bulletin board/gossip clique area.
The newsgroup they chose, apparently at random from among the hundreds of
empty Usenet joke-newsgroup wastelands: alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. [The
circumstances surrounding the birth of this newsgroup can now be told,
thanks to the location of the original newgroup control message.]
This small group of posters set up their little regime in this forgotten
newsgroup, posting daily schedules and post count summaries, talking about
this class and that event and this and that and the other. Eventually, they
tired of posting articles about their immensely boring daily lives, so they
turned their attention to the computer network world around them. First they
tried their hand at penny-ante crossposting, branching out to claim other
empty newsgroups, such as alt.fan.ok-soda and alt.fan.pooh. This soon grew
stale as well, as each poster moved into a new group only to find the same
bored people he/she left behind.
Apparently as a result of the Ivy-League uppity belief that all the world
should be like them (and also as a result of trying to avoid studying for
exams), one of the posters suggested that they "invade" a real, populated
newsgroup and "rile up the stupid people". When Matt Bruce, another of the
Harvard band, heard this, he wrote this response:
"I suggest that we start either posting or crossposting to
alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. I also suggest that we use big words and perfect
grammar, and refuse to write as the young ruffians in question speak.
"This could lead to some interesting 'dialogue.' "
This article was posted directly to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. The regulars
at that group, wondering what the world was coming to, scoffed at the notion
of a couple of stuck-up geeks from Harvard calling them "ruffians", and a
few unpleasantries were exchanged. This crosspost-tossing attracted the
attention of an unknown poster going by the name of Dontonio Wingfield.
He/she discovered that one of the Harvard posters, Chuck Truesdell, placed
"meow meow" (a reference to Henrietta Pussycat of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood
fame) in many of his posts as a sort of calling card, as his initials spell
"C.A.T.". Matt Bruce picked up on this practice for one post (the quote at
the top of this page), and someone, for some reason, took that article out
of afk-mn, crossposting it to a dozen newsgroups as a troll against the
"Nosers" (as the Harvard students called themselves). Dontonio Wingfield
either instigated this troll, or was the first to reply to it:
"What the hell is this felgercarbe? Would you mind keeping it the hell out of
HERE?"
The Dontonio Wingfield persona then, of course, vanished. The posters in the
targeted groups, noting the "meow meow" elements, began to retaliate against
the supposed original crossposter, Matt Bruce. These posters entered the
'Nose and found it full of other Harvard students like Matt, and the
counter-invaders flamed and spewed "meow" with vigor, In time, flames
containing the word "meow" would start popping up all over the place, aimed
mostly at areas where the high-class uppity Ivy-League snots were known to
congregate, such as alt.college.college-bowl. Other flames targeted snobbish
college kids who regularly huffed their freckled noses in newsgroups such as
alt.music.nin. Some of the more daring souls decided to forge articles in
Bruce's name, spreading the "meow" attacks to more and more groups,
including afk-mn, to add to the onslaught against him and his
"intellectually elite" cohorts.
When the real Matt Bruce caught wind of the uproar, he and the other Harvard
students first tried to write his attack on atbnb as a "joke". When no one
bought his story, he attempted more forcefully to get the attackers to stop,
which only sounded like more condescending talk:
"Please stop. Cease and desist. You are only making yourselves look silly."
When this only fanned the flames further, he threatened to cancel all
articles containing the word "meow", and to netcop all the "meow" article
forgers. This "Cancellation Notice", posted about a month and a half after
the first "meow" troll, was apparently the proverbial last straw. A person
crossposting into 12 newsgroups, then claiming it a "joke", when he
obviously had no sense of humor? This pissed off the Usenet Performance
Artists to no end. it was time to teach Matt Bruce - and the rest of his
gang of snots - a lesson. Suddenly, afk-mn, alt.college.college-bowl, and
scores of other groups were flooded to the gills and beyond with hundreds
upon hundreds of huge meow articles from all corners of Usenet. Cascades,
ASCII cats, hundred-line "meow" hello-world-type flood posts, and more were
posted, reposted, munged, pureed, and regurgitated all over the servers of
the world. The Harvard kids' protests were quickly lost in the feline tidal
wave. Every post by a Harvard snot would result in fifty cascade follow-ups.
alt.college.college-bowl, a known regular haunt of Matt Bruce, was reduced
to a smoldering crater, so inundated with meows that its regulars could no
longer use it. After a couple of weeks of this, Usenet in general looked
like Chernobyl, or the Marina district of San Francisco after the 1989
earthquake, or downtown Nagasaki the day after the fall of the Fat Man.
A number of the attackers, calling themselves the "MEOW MEOW ARMY", were
bent on taking over afk-mn and occupying it as their own. It soon was - the
Harvard students, seeing a fire raging out of control in their cyber Dunster
House, were compelled to escape to a local, non-propagated newsgroup on a
Harvard server.The meow hurricane, however,simply refused to die:
alt.college.college-bowl continued to be attacked until almost a year after
Matt Bruce's now infamous post, and the Meowers now in afk-mn began to
redecorate their new home (with the legendary Fluffy, formerly Matt Bruce's
pet, claiming ownership of all of Usenet), merging with the verbal abuse
powerhouse known as the Mighty Alt Dot FlameTM.
Today, afk-mn remains as a sort of Usenet posting relay hub. The first- and
second- generation Meowers also became alt.flame regulars. Other bases of
Usenet Performance Art, such as alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk,
alt.non.sequitur, and alt.stupidity, long bases of Meow action, also traded
regulars with the Nose. These groups fused together to form what is now
known as the Empire of Meow.
This empire is still growing as you read this, as in 1998 the groups
alt.flame.niggers and demon.local were recently annexed much in the same
fashion as the 'Nose. There are hundreds of groups throughout the alt.*
heirarchy who have at least heard of the Meow movement... every so often, a
troll warning will be posted to these groups, sometimes even warning the
inhabitants about elements that the Empire has nothing to do with:
"You will be able to recognize a troll and an impending invasion from
alt.syntax.tactical by cascades, numerous appearances of the word 'meow',
and crossposts to alt.fan.karl-malden.nose..."
Also, throughout its lifetime, the actions of the Empire have seemingly
become a convenient scapegoat for real Usenet abuses. In February of 1997,
several inhabitants of the 'Nose were placed under a Usenet Death Penalty,
or UDP, for over a week by a certain self-made Usenet "spam canceller". The
crime: cascades. Also, in 1998, Meow became the whipping boy for those
persons who wanted a UDP imposed on Altopia News Service, which many Meowers
use to post to Usenet, because of the few Altopia users who were committing
blatant acts of abuse such as mailbombing and post flooding. These accusers
were wont to include relatively harmless acts of off-topic crossposts and
cascades in with the real problems. Apparently, there will always be those,
like the Harvard kids, who will not tolerate the right that all Usenetters
have to act silly, or to have a sense of humor, or to have the view that
nothing should be taken too seriously. It should, however, be noted that
without the existence of tight-sphinctered conservative snots, there would
be no Meow in the first place. Hated or not, it would thus seem that the
phenomenon known as MEOW, and its practitioners known as MEOWERS, have
forever carved their place among the legends of Usenet, along with the likes
of Kibology and the first MMF chain letter. Clealy, sir, the Empire of
Meow's feline vocalizations will be heard forever more throughout Usenet
history.
Meow.