/krem-vaks/ Originally, a fict
ITious
Usenet s
ITe at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of
Usenet VAXen w
ITh names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool' s joke. Other fict
ITious s
ITes mentioned in the hoax were moskvax and
kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool' s forgeries perpetrated on
Usenet (which has negligible secur
ITy against them), because the notion that
Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time. In fact,
IT was only six years later that the first genuine s
ITe in Moscow, demos.su, joined
Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that 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 qu
ITe aware of all this, referred to
IT frequently in his own postings, and at one point tw
ITted some credulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have the domain' s gateway s
ITe *named* kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into truth and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humour transcends cultural barriers. Mr. Antonov also contributed some Russian-language material 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 w
IThin the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included immediate transl
ITerations of Boris Yeltsin' s decrees condemning the coup and eyew
ITness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow' s streets. In those hours, years of speculation that total
ITarianism would prove unable to maintain
ITs grip on pol
ITically-loaded information in the age of computer networking were proved devastatingly accurate - and the original kremvax joke became a real
ITy 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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