The kremvax hoax (1984)

https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html

by classichasclass • 3 years ago

86 24 3 years ago

godfatherof.nl

greggsy• 3 years ago

Page is unreadable on ios, and reader doesn’t render. Is there a reformatted version? Seems interesting.

neonate• 3 years ago

Any better?

https://archive.ph/dYaRd

http://web.archive.org/web/20230326102052/https://godfathero...

giantrobot2• 3 years ago

Something about the page's structure causes Safari's reader mode to only display the first quoted section but no other part of the content. Those mirrors don't do anything to help the page's structure unfortunately.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Interesting; Reader Mode works fine in GNOME's WebKit-based browser. Seems like an Apple specific bug, perhaps you should report it.

romanhn• 3 years ago

Fascinating to see a frequent use of emoticons in replies from early 1984, only two years after their invention.

TedDoesntTalk2• 3 years ago

I don’t recall anyone calling them emoticons back then.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

I believe we knew them as "smileys".

MarkusWandel• 3 years ago

What the article doesn't particularly emphasize is that "kgbvax" etc. wasn't a troll along the line of "OMG they're stealing our technology". It was just that a lot of Usenet nodes of the day had "vax" at the end of their name because, well, that's what everyone was running for internet nodes in those days (running 4.2BSD or so, the definitive Unix to have in those days).

euroderf2• 3 years ago

VAXen were def the targets of technology transfer. Shell companies in South Africa, in Finland, elsewhere.

triyambakam• 3 years ago

I hate April fools. It's not universally celebrated so it's always unclear what is actually a prank.

TedDoesntTalk2• 3 years ago

April Fools pranks cause the needless suffering and anxiety of many for the joy of one person. I especially hate IT and work-related pranks.

George83728• 3 years ago

As a day for putting whoopy cushions on people's chairs, I don't have a problem with it. But the way it's celebrated online, basically as "fake news day", is obnoxiously lame and uniformly unfunny.

ChainOfFools• 3 years ago

Whenever I try to explain the joy of bangpaths to the youth of today the!message!always!gets!lost

mzerod• 3 years ago

(This message has been read 1 times so far in this BBS).

Path: !CX2SA!N6RME!KE6JJJ!KQ6UP!AA6HF!N2NOV!W4BFB!N0NJY!WA3WLH!W9GM!WA2UET! !K5DAT!W0ARP!KF5JRV!

We’re still using their cousins on amateur radio lol

anonymousiam• 3 years ago

The use case for UUCP-style forwarding on amateur (packet) radio platforms makes perfect sense. Like the early Internet (ARPANet), many packet stations do not operate 24/7 for various reasons such as changes in propagation or the operator using the radios/computers for other purposes. The store-and-forward messaging paradigm is best for sporadic networks such as this.

euroderf2• 3 years ago

There should be an internet Shrine of Seismo.

m4632• 3 years ago

Reminds me of an old "fake traceroute" site that would show a link between the whitehouse and the kremlin.

I was thinking you could probably implement it with ipfilter firewall rules pretty easily.

if you had control of for example 192.168.0.2, and it routed through your 192.168.0.1, you could reject packets by ttl value with src ip being whitehouse.gov and kremlin.ru and then any chain you wanted until ttl > 192.168.0.2.

EDIT: maybe https://github.com/blechschmidt/fakeroute/blob/master/fakero...

ggm• 3 years ago

At the time, friends/family were annoyed at anti-soviet memetics. Why shouldn't a Russian computer be on UUCP? Much of the discussion was basically stupid, reactionary noises. Research institutes worldwide were interconnected by email across multiple protocols, NATO summerschools were held in interesting economies, Conversations happened.

When Vadim named his node later on as a post-hoc self-referential joke, it kind of made things even worse. Ironical self-deprecating humour can do that.

Jokes are sometimes both more and less funny than intended. It's in the nature of humour. When they escape into the wild, it can go to some very odd places. "The Aristocrats" is kind-of the end-game of "thats not funny" when it comes to apparently funny stories. Kremvax isn't quite there, but its along the road of things which demanded you make a wall between people, to insert some humour into it.

082349872349872• 3 years ago

I was on a mailing list with someone who went to see "kremvax". According to the story, the poor secretaries at the CWI were attempting to explain that they were a research institution, not a tourist destination, when to their great surprise a passing grad student, overhearing the conversation, said, "oh, yeah, kremvax ... follow me!" and took the 'tourist' into the machine room without further ado.

The kremvax hoax (1984)

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