This both real and a decent metaphor, so it is time for me to re-tell a story.

Ever heard of The Ping Of Death?

There was a couple of years there - years, hand to god - where you could throw a single malformed or too-large packet across the network at any IP you could see, and if you malformed it just right for its OS, you could crash the machine. You could kill a Windows machine with one line in cmd.exe.

It was bad, but almost nobody knows how bad.

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