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Kremvax
A message was distributed to members of Usenet (the online messaging community that existed before the rise of the internet), announcing that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. This was quite a shock to many, since most assumed that cold war security concerns would have prevented such a link-up. The message purported to come from Konstantin Chernenko (from the address chernenko@kremvax.UUCP) who explained that the Soviet Union wanted to join the network in order to “have a means of having an open discussion forum with the American and European people.“ The message created a flood of responses from members of the Usenet community. Two weeks later the author of the message revealed that it was a hoax.
Kremvax Haiku (submitted by Hoax Museum readers)
| USSRnet? Web unites old opponents? Won’t get fooled again! (by Paul) |
| More from the Hoax Museum Archives: | |||
Not funny, but definately Very Cool!
Posted by Jennifer on Thu Apr 01, 2004 at 12:37 PM
The nice thing of this April Fool's is that you can still look it up in Google groups:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr;=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&threadm=0001@kremvax.UUCP&rnum=22&prev;=/groups?q=chernenko%40kremvax.UUCP&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&scoring=d&start=30&sa=N
Posted by Berend on Thu Apr 01, 2004 at 04:44 PM
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr;=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&threadm=0001@kremvax.UUCP&rnum=22&prev;=/groups?q=chernenko%40kremvax.UUCP&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&scoring=d&start=30&sa=N
Read more, from and about Piet: 
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~piet/
http://www.beertema.nl/
http://www.beertema.nl/Piet_Beertema.pdf
Posted by Ruud H.G. van Tol in Amsterdam - NL on Tue Sep 21, 2004 at 03:59 PM
http://homepages.cwi.nl/~piet/ http://www.beertema.nl/
http://www.beertema.nl/Piet_Beertema.pdf
More information about this can be found at http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/K/kremvax.html.
Posted by Lukas Mai on Sat Apr 02, 2005 at 06:46 PM
I believe the company that connected the Soviet Union to the Internet was SovAm Teleport which received technical services from Mark Graham.
A year later when there was an attempted coup in the Soviety Union, one of the only sources of news going into the Soviet Union was that e-mail link.
That was one of the first 'high profile' moments for the Internet in the pre-hype
days.
Posted by Ken on Sat Apr 02, 2005 at 10:39 PM
A year later when there was an attempted coup in the Soviety Union, one of the only sources of news going into the Soviet Union was that e-mail link.
That was one of the first 'high profile' moments for the Internet in the pre-hype
days.
Does this have anything to do with the prank version 4.2bsd, Bolshevik Siberian Distribution?
Posted by Kaleberg on Thu Mar 29, 2007 at 08:11 PM
as mentioned in the hacker's dictionary link above, a hilarious coda to the joke is that once there actually was a machine called kremvax, no one believed it.
Posted by akb427 on Sat Jan 05, 2008 at 05:13 AM
Classic, not really funny till the end though.
Posted by Matt on Tue Apr 01, 2008 at 11:07 PM
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