Back to the old punch tape: A computer is like a robot, controlled by a roll of toilet-paper covered in stickers. The pattern of stickers controls the robot. Y

Back to the old punch tape: A computer is like a robot, controlled by a roll of toilet-paper covered in stickers. The pattern of stickers controls the robot. You can't put more than one sticker in a single square. Let's say I buy a house-keeping robot. The manufacturers left 64 consecutive squares of toilet-paper blank. The manual says I can specify which parts of the house I want cleaned by filling in the blanks with stickers. If I add more than 64 stickers, this means I covered-up some of the stickers the manufacturers put on. This causes the robot to malfunction. This is called an overflow. If I know the language the stickers are written in, I can intentionally overflow the robot to act in (potentially evil) ways that have nothing to do with cleaning.