/krem-vaks/
ORiginally, a fictitious
Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of
Usenet VAXen with names of the f
ORm foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly
ORiginated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually f
ORged 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 f
ORgeries perpetrated on
Usenet (which has negligible security 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 site in Moscow, demos.su, joined
Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren' t just another prank. Vadim Antonov, seni
OR programmer at Demos and the maj
OR 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 that he *was* a hoax! Eventually he even arranged to have the domain' s gateway site *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 f
OR the
Jargon File. In an even m
ORe ironic hist
ORical 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 netw
ORk centreed on kremvax became the only trustw
ORthy news source f
OR many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-b
ORder postings included immediate transliterations of B
ORis Yeltsin' s decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness rep
ORts of the demonstrations in Moscow' s streets. In those hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its grip on politically-loaded inf
ORmation in the age of computer netw
ORking were proved devastatingly accurate - 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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