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Spam
  • Unsolicited commercial e-mail. Spelled with all lowercase letters when used this way. If capitalized as Spam, refers to a Hormel meat product.
  • vt. [from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"] To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also buffer overflow, smash the stack.
  • To cause a newsgroup to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. You can spam a newsgroup with as little as one well- (or ill-) planned message (e. g. asking "What do you think of abortion?" on soc. women). This is often done with cross-posting (e. g. any message which is crossposted to alt. rush-limbaugh and alt. politics. homosexuality will almost inevitably spam both groups). The second definition has become much more prevalent as the Internet has opened up to non-techies, and to many Usenetters it is probably now (1995) primary.