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From: dhp@att.ATT.COM (Price)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.sysadmin
Subject: netnews cancer FIX!
Keywords: microsoft articles cancer duplicates
Message-ID: <165@att.ATT.COM>
Date: 10 Oct 88 19:52:29 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Indian Hill
Lines: 41

As many of you are aware, there are, at the time of this posting, three
rouge articles ping-ponging around the net.  These articles are cancerous.
That is, they replicate without limit due to a tab character embedded in the
article ID.  A tab is also the field separator in the history file, causing
the article recognition code to continue to accept the duplicate article.

The articles in question are generating thousands of duplicate articles
in rec.games.hack, misc.test and sci.space.shuttle.

Here follows an EMERGENCY PATCH for header.c that corrects the weakness
in the netnews history mechanism that permits this to happen.

At approximately line 160 of header.c, insert the declaration for char *cp:

register struct hbuf *hp;
{
	int	unreccnt = 0;
	register int	i;
> 	register char *cp;

	i = type(bfr);

At approximately line 200, insert the for() loop code after getfield has
collected the article ID from the header:

		case MESSAGEID:
			getfield(hp->ident, sizeof(hp->ident));
> 			for (cp = hp->ident; *cp != '\0'; cp++)
> 				if (*cp == '\t')
> 					*cp = ' ';
			break;

This will translate all tabs in the message ID into spaces, which will 
prevent the history mechanism from failing to note the duplicate article.

Hopefully, an official patch will follow from the POWERS THAT BE.
-- 

						Douglas H. Price
						Postmaster, att
						att!dhp