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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Some 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.
