About the Museum
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about dubious- sounding claims, and whatever else strikes our fancy. The site is also home to the Hoaxipedia (the museum's online encyclopedia of hoaxes), and the Hoax Forum.

The museum was created in 1997 by Alex Boese. He's assisted by a staff of deputy curators and docents. Alex is the author of three books, most recently Elephants on Acid: And Other Bizarre Experiments (which has nothing to do with hoaxes). Check out the list of the Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time for a preview.



Web Hoax Museum

Prankplace.com
COVERT CLICKER
Secretly control the TV, anywhere, any time! This device is so small it is easily concealed in your pocket. It can control volume, change the channel or turn the TV on & off. It works on 90% of all TV's.

THE TOILET MONSTER
Your wife will never yell at you about leaving the seat up again! The Toilet Monster attaches to the inside of the toilet bowl by suction cups. As the unsuspecting person goes to use the bathroom, they'll scream as they lift the lid and are greeted by the Toilet Monster! Not recommended for the elderly or those with a weak heart.


#13: Kremvax
1984: A message distributed to the members of Usenet (the online messaging community that was one of the first forms the internet took) announced that the Soviet Union was joining Usenet. This generated enormous excitement, since most Usenet members had assumed that cold war security concerns would prevent 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. Two weeks later its true author, a European man named Piet Beertema, revealed it was a hoax. This is believed to be the first hoax on the internet. Six years later, when Moscow really did link up to the internet, it adopted the domain name 'kremvax' in honor of the hoax.

Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.
Page 1 of 1 pages
Not funny, but definately Very Cool!
Posted by Jennifer  on  Thu Apr 01, 2004  at  09:37 AM
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%40kremvax.UUCP&rnum=22&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dchernenko%2540kremvax.UUCP%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26c2coff%3D1%26scoring%3Dd%26start%3D30%26sa%3DN
Posted by Berend  on  Thu Apr 01, 2004  at  01:44 PM
Read more, from and about Piet: smile http://homepages.cwi.nl/~piet/ smile
http://www.beertema.nl/ smile
http://www.beertema.nl/Piet_Beertema.pdf grin
Posted by Ruud H.G. van Tol  in  Amsterdam - NL  on  Tue Sep 21, 2004  at  12:59 PM
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  03:46 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  06:39 PM
Does this have anything to do with the prank version 4.2bsd, Bolshevik Siberian Distribution?
Posted by Kaleberg  on  Thu Mar 29, 2007  at  05:11 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  02:13 AM
Classic, not really funny till the end though.
Posted by Matt  on  Tue Apr 01, 2008  at  08:07 PM
Page 1 of 1 pages

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