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The kremvax hoax (1984)
- greggsy 3y agoPage is unreadable on ios, and reader doesn’t render. Is there a reformatted version? Seems interesting.
- neonate 3y agoAny better? https://archive.ph/dYaRd https://archive.ph/dYaRd http://web.archive.org/web/20230326102052/https://godfatherof.nl/kremvax.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230326102052/https://godfathero...
- giantrobot 3y agoSomething 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.
- m463 3y agoI've wondered if some commercial websites that behave this way do it "accidentally on purpose"
- giantrobot 3y agoSome commercial sites definitely break reader modes on purpose. I think this is more a case of a Safari bug. The site's text content is just served in raw divs inside table rows. The quoted Usenet posts are inside pre elements inside table rows. A div is more of a logical grouping element than a text-containing block element. So Safari's reader is showing the first text-containing block element it finds. If you want to break reader mode in Safari I guess the secret is to just use horribly mangled HTML. TIL.
- jeroenhd 3y agoInteresting; Reader Mode works fine in GNOME's WebKit-based browser. Seems like an Apple specific bug, perhaps you should report it.
- romanhn 3y agoFascinating to see a frequent use of emoticons in replies from early 1984, only two years after their invention.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoI don’t recall anyone calling them emoticons back then.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI believe we knew them as "smileys".
- gweinberg 3y agoOr cows.
- Agingcoder 3y agoAren’t they still called smileys ? Or am I getting really old ?
- kadoban 3y agoI haven't seen them called that in quite a while. It's possible it's regional or something though.
- MarkusWandel 3y agoWhat 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).
- euroderf 3y agoVAXen were def the targets of technology transfer. Shell companies in South Africa, in Finland, elsewhere.
- triyambakam 3y agoI hate April fools. It's not universally celebrated so it's always unclear what is actually a prank.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoApril Fools pranks cause the needless suffering and anxiety of many for the joy of one person. I especially hate IT and work-related pranks.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- George83728 3y agoAs 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 3y agoWhenever I try to explain the joy of bangpaths to the youth of today the!message!always!gets!lost
- mzerod 3y 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 3y agoThe 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.
- euroderf 3y agoThere should be an internet Shrine of Seismo.
- m463 3y agoReminds 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/fakeroute.py https://github.com/blechschmidt/fakeroute/blob/master/fakero...
- ggm 3y agoAt 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 3y agoI 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.