Segfault

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

~ the obituary ~

A parody only lands on people who know the original by heart. In 1998 Slashdot was a site i could reach on a 33.6k line from Turkey, and it was not a site i lived inside. Segfault was written for the people who lived inside it, the ones who could tell you what the front page had said that morning. The distance on this grave is not regional. It comes down to how many hours a day you had the thing open.

The site posted fake news about the same subjects Slashdot covered for real, at roughly the same rhythm, in the same layout. Scott James Remnant ran it, later going on to work on Ubuntu and then ChromeOS. Leonard Richardson came in as an editor in 1998 and ended up editor-in-chief. The first capture the archive holds of segfault.org is 12 December 1998, and the earliest story Richardson kept a copy of is dated 11 August of that year.

Nearly everything on it was written by readers, which is the part that made it hard to keep running. Richardson's own diagnosis afterwards is the clearest thing anybody has written about why satire sites of that era burned out: submitting a link to Slashdot is easy, and writing a good satirical story requires a funny idea and the ability to write, which are two different things and neither is common. So Segfault ran on a thin supply of good material and a thick supply of adequate material.

The last front page the archive holds is 20 July 2001. The top story is about the FBI arresting Dmitry Sklyarov at Def Con, dated two days earlier, with the joke being that the encryption expert responded by encrypting 449 FBI firearms and 184 of its laptops. That is the last thing Segfault published that anybody can still read in place. The webserver went away sometime in the four months after it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it published ~

The good ones survived because people quoted them for years. "Man clicks Internet banner ad" is the entire joke in the headline, filed in a period when the industry was still discussing click-through rates as though they described human behavior. "Microsoft Supercomputer Discovers New Integer Between 5 and 6" is the other one everybody remembers, and it works because in 2000 it did not sound impossible.

Peter Norvig wrote for it, which is the detail that tends to stop people. The man who would later be director of research at Google filed a piece called "Songwriters, Publishers Sue Themselves" during the years the music industry was suing everything that moved. A free humor site with no budget was getting contributions from that tier of person because there was nowhere else to put a joke of that shape, and because in 2000 the tech industry was small enough that everybody read the same eight websites.

~ the comment section ~

Slashdot had a moderation system with karma and metamoderation, built specifically to keep its comment section usable at scale. Segfault parodied Slashdot's front page and did not parody its moderation, so the comments ran open. What grew there was not just trolls but a working culture of trolling, with its own techniques and its own sense of craft.

A fair number of the trolling forms that later turned up on Slashdot itself were developed on Segfault first, by people practicing on a site where nobody was going to stop them. It ended the way it had to: the editors eventually switched comments off, on a site whose entire premise was reader participation. The joke there writes itself and nobody involved found it funny.

~ the machine got repurposed ~

VA Linux hosted Segfault for free for years. The same company had bought Andover.net on 7 June 2000, and Andover.net owned Slashdot, so from that summer the Slashdot parody and Slashdot itself were paying rent to the same landlord. Nobody seems to have found this awkward at the time.

On 29 November 2001 the front page was replaced with five lines from Richardson saying the site had recently lost its webserver, and that he and Scott had found a new home and were working on getting the old code and stories onto it. It thanks VA Linux for the years of hosting. It reads like a two-week outage.

The follow-up is dated 10 April 2002 and it is the actual death notice. The source code was gone and so was every story graphic, along with a share of the stories themselves, because the VA machine hosting Segfault had been repurposed and there were no backups to speak of. Richardson had a copy of the database that held no story text. What he did next is the part worth keeping: he went to the Wayback Machine and pulled roughly 80 percent of the archive back out of it, then posted a list of the stories still missing and asked anybody holding a copy to mail him. A satire site about computers was reconstructed from a web crawler's cache because its host had wiped the disk.

~ it works ~

The domain segfault.org still resolves. There is a machine answering on it right now, and what that machine serves is the Apache2 Ubuntu default page, the gray one with the feather at the top, headed It works! and going on to explain that this is the default welcome page and that the site operator has not yet added any content.

Twenty-five years after a site named for a memory-access error was killed by somebody wiping a server, its domain is serving the page a webserver shows when nobody has configured it. Segfault could not have published that. It is too on the nose.

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