Adequacy.org

» see adequacy.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the list is still going around. every couple of years somebody posts "is your son a computer hacker?" to a forum and the replies fill with people meeting it for the first time, and the name of the site that published it almost never travels with the text. that site was adequacy.org. it ran the piece on 2 december 2001 and closed nine months later, so the joke has now outlived its publisher by more than twenty years.

i was seventeen in december 2001 and my forums were turkish ones, donanimhaber and frmtr, where the arguments were about ram timings and which power supply would not kill your board. the english-language slashdot comment culture that adequacy existed to torment was not somewhere i posted. the piece i knew before i knew the site, which is exactly the condition adequacy engineered on purpose.

the site opened on 4 july 2001 under an editor who never used a name other than elby. the slogan was news for grown-ups, aimed directly at slashdot's news for nerds, stuff that matters. it looked like a normal community weblog of the period, with a story queue, member diaries, polls down the right rail and a public bin of rejected submissions. what was different was that every word on it was written to make a specific kind of reader lose their temper.

~ the case file ~

~ the list ~

"is your son a computer hacker?" was signed t reginald gibbons and written as a concerned father's public service. his daughter cindy had run into the living room shouting that peter was a computer hacker, and after a few days of investigation he was publishing the ten warning signs so other families would not be caught out. the tone never breaks once across the whole piece.

sign eight is the one people remember. bsd, lunix, debian and mandrake are versions of an illegal hacker operating system invented by a soviet computer hacker named linyos torovoltos, and if you see the word lilo when your machine starts up you will have to return the computer to the manufacturer for a new hard drive, because lunix cannot be removed without destroying part of the disk surface. sign five warns that amd is a third world company making knock-off copies of american chips with the security features deliberately disabled. sign six explains that quake is a virtual reality where hackers train with firearms, so parents should check that the guns in the house are locked up.

~ what the joke was actually about ~

the comment count is the artifact. 5,913 people replied, and the editors hid several thousand more, which put one story above anything slashdot had recorded at that point. reading the thread now, the split is clean: a few dozen people saying this is obviously satire and thousands of people patiently correcting the soviet and then the amd claim, one of them confessing that he had been putting firewall after firewall on his own machine to keep himself out. the poll running beside the article asked why readers were scared of hackers and 58 percent of the 11,015 votes went to "they smell bad."

the register wrote it up on 11 january 2002 and techtv gave adequacy site of the night on the screen savers four days earlier, which is roughly when the thing stopped being a prank on one audience and became a piece of general internet furniture. the page it was hosted on is dead. the text is on a thousand other pages, usually with no byline at all.

~ the day it closed ~

adequacy stopped publishing on 11 september 2002, one year to the day after the attacks it had spent its first autumn writing straight-faced garbage about. the site had run a piece arguing that the bombings meant everyone must support the author's politics, and a petition asking the band anthrax to change its name. picking that anniversary as a closing date was not an accident, and at the time nobody could tell whether the closure was itself the last bit.

the archive settles what the front page did. a full site sits at 7,694 bytes on 20 july 2002, and by 14 september there are 382 bytes left, an html file with no visible content and a meta refresh that waited thirty seconds and then sent you to kuro5hin.org. the trolls closed the door and forwarded the traffic to the site they had been trolling. months later elby put the stories back up as a static archive with a short note saying he did not think he was going to spend much more time on it, and that archive is still sitting there.

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