At the time in 1984, when Internet was in its first
stages, a message was distributed to the members of the online messaging
community of the Usenet by some Konstantin Chernenko (from the address
chernenko@kremvax.UUCP) announcing that the Soviet Union was joining
Usenet. Immediately, a great debate issued on the subject and the cold
war security concerns surfaced in the minds of many American and
European people. The message explained that in this way Soviet Union
wanted to 'have a means of having an open discussion forum with
Americans and Europeans.' It was only after two weeks that the real
perpetrator of the prank, an European man named Piet Beertema, admitted
it to be a hoax (it was the first hoax on the Net). Six years later,
when Moscow really linked up to the Internet, it adopted the domain name
'kremvax' to honor the hoax.
In the April 1994 issue of PC Computing magazine, John Dvorak wrote an
article about a bill supposedly numbered as 040194 (i.e. 04/01/94) that
one could not use Information Highway or Internet while drunk or discuss
sexual matters over a public network. The bill could be used by the FBI
to tap the phone line of anyone who 'uses or abuses alcohol' while
accessing the Internet. The contact person was listed as Lirpa Sloof
(April Fools spelled backwards). Senator Edward Kennedy was alleged to
be responsible to bring out the bill and he and the Congress was
bombarded with so many outraged phone calls to Congress that he had to
release an official denial of the rumor that he was a sponsor of the
bill. Yet another April Fool e-mail message that created quite a furor
in 1997 stated that the internet would be shut down for cleaning for
twenty-four hours throughout the world from March 31 until April 2 to
cleanse 'electronic flotsam and jetsam' from the network that included
purging the dead email and inactive ftp, www, and gopher sites.