/krem-vaks/ Originally, a fictitious
Usenet site
AT the Kremlin, named like the then large number of
Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly origin
ATed there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool' s joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and
kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool' s forgeries perpetr
ATed on
Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the notion th
AT Usenet might ever penetr
ATe the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd
AT the time. In fact, it was only six years l
ATer th
AT the first genuine site in Moscow, demos.su, joined
Usenet. Some readers needed convincing th
AT the postings from it weren' t just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer
AT Demos and the major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it frequently in his own postings, and
AT one point twitted some credulous readers by blandly asserting th
AT he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have the domain' s g
ATeway site *named* kremvax, thus ne
ATly turning fiction into truth and demonstr
ATing th
AT the hackish sense of humour transcends cultural barriers. Mr. Antonov also contributed some Russian-language m
ATerial for the
Jargon File. In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic centre of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centreed on kremvax became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentr
ATing on internal communic
ATions, cross-border postings included immedi
ATe transliter
ATions of Boris Yeltsin' s decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstr
ATions in Moscow' s streets. In those hours, years of specul
ATion th
AT totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded inform
ATion in the age of computer networking were proved devast
ATingly accur
ATe - and the original kremvax joke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of "glasnost" and "perestroika" made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the West. [
Jargon File]
In addition suitable contents:
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