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kremvax

Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

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}]
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