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4.5 KiB
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35 lines
4.5 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>kremvax</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../K.html" title="K"/><link rel="previous" href="Kool-Aid.html" title="Kool-Aid"/><link rel="next" href="kyrka.html" title="kyrka"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">kremvax</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="Kool-Aid.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">K</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="kyrka.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="kremvax"/><dt xmlns="" id="kremvax"><b>kremvax</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/krem·vaks/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> [from the then-large number of <a href="../U/Usenet.html"><i class="glossterm">Usenet</i></a>
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<a href="../V/VAXen.html"><i class="glossterm">VAXen</i></a> with names of the form <tt class="systemitem">foovax</tt>] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site
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at the Kremlin, announced on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly
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originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The <a href=" http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=0001%40kremvax.UUCP" target="_top"> posting</a>
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was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an April Fool's joke. Other
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fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were <tt class="systemitem">moskvax</tt> and <a href="kgbvax.html"><i class="glossterm">kgbvax</i></a>.
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This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries
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perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because
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the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so
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totally absurd at the time.</p><p>In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in
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Moscow, <tt class="systemitem">demos.su</tt>, joined Usenet.
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Some readers needed convincing that the postings from it weren't just
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another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major
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poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to
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it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous
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readers by blandly asserting that he <span class="emphasis"><em>was</em></span> a
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hoax!</p><p>Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named
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<tt class="systemitem">kremvax</tt>, thus neatly turning
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fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor
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transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the
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Russian-language material for this lexicon. —ESR]</p><p>In an even more ironic historical footnote, <tt class="systemitem">kremvax</tt> became an electronic center of the
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anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August 1991.
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During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on <tt class="systemitem">kremvax</tt> became the only trustworthy news
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source for many places within the USSR. Though the sysops were
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concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings included
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immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup
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and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those
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hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to
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maintain its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer
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networking were proved devastatingly accurate — and the original
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<tt class="systemitem">kremvax</tt> joke became a reality as
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Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of <span class="firstterm">glasnost</span> and <span class="firstterm">perestroika</span> made <tt class="systemitem">kremvax</tt> one of the timeliest means of their
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outreach to the West.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="Kool-Aid.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../K.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="kyrka.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Kool-Aid </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> kyrka</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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