kremvax
/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 originated 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
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, 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 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 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 concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings
included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the
coup and eyewitness reports 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 information in the age of computer networking
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]
Nearby terms:
K&R « KRC « K&R C « kremvax » KRL » KRS »
KRYPTON
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