Leonard's old Segfault stories

2007/01/24 - From 1998 to 2001 I was an editor, and eventually the editor, of the online geek humor site segfault.org. I'm not particularly proud of this. For the first year of its life, Segfault had an effectively unmoderated comment system, and it bred not only hideous trolls but an entire subculture of hideous trolling. We left the comment cesspit untouched for far longer than we should have, because we were working from an incorrect model of how the web fosters free speech. The Wikipedia article makes it sound Segfault was the proving ground for the modern techniques of Slashdot trolls, which is probably within a Wikipedia-sigma of accuracy. So I apologize for that.

The other reason I'm not too proud of Segfault is that the concept turned out to be flawed. The idea was that Segfault would be an operational parody of Slashdot (for the youngsters in the crowd, imagine Slashdot as a cross between Digg and Boing Boing). The geeky masses would submit their hilarious satirical news stories to us, and we'd aggregate the best ones by publishing them on our site. In retrospect, this was exactly the kind of fuzzy idea that people come up with while there's an Internet bubble on.

See, submitting a link to Slashdot is easy because someone else (the person at the other end of the link) has already done the work of being interesting. To write a good satirical news story you must have 1) a funny idea, and 2) the ability to write. Comedy is humor plus delivery. It was a rare Segfault submitter who combined these qualities, and despite my attempts to punch up the "funny idea" stories, the expected quality of even the published Segfault stories was pretty low. So Segfault stumbled along for three years publishing "eh" stories and occasional gems, and when our host (VA Linux, now VA Software) destroyed the site in a hard drive mishap I didn't exactly have a whole lot of incentive to get it running again.

But there are some things about Segfault that I remember fondly and at a safe distance. There were the stories that burst free of Segfault and became folklore, like the Gospel of Tux, and the ones that should have but didn't, like RFC 31337 and Martijn Faassen's series about the busybodies at GOSSIPI (Good Open Source Software In the Public Interest). There was the story Rick Miller wrote where he got Linus Torvalds to pose like Bill Gates. I still think about my own stories, when they were good, and good lines from my lousy stories (an otherwise unremarkable story had the epic headline "Linux: Windows Avenger or Worm-Ridden OS of Filth?"). I think about the way this site let me catch onto some small portion of the dot-com wave, or at least fool myself into believing I had. And of course there's the fact that I met my wife through Segfault.

Maybe enough time has passed that the Segfault stories can be seen as historical documents, ways of gauging at the obsessions of nerds in the late 1990s. I look at these stories, and remember the ones from the slush pile, and I can't believe people were so obsessed with Microsoft, so fundamentally insecure about Linux and the open source model. I go weeks now without thinking about Microsoft. If Segfault were around today it would be full of lame jokes about Google and Wikipedia. You'd still have the MPAA lawsuit jokes; some things never change.

That might qualify as humor but I always wanted Segfault to be satire, to hold a mirror up to the insanity of the times. When I look back on my early writing, that's what I look for. I've decided to give a new home to a few of my stories that best capture the fervor that heralded the rise of Linux, as well as the hubris of the dot-com boom and the denial stage of the bust.

With that in mind, here are my lame-ass ten-year-old stories.

• 2001/05/08 Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie. I wasn't going to put this up because the "Thermodynamic" story from 1999 covers the same ground more fruitfully (see below for an analysis), but this was the last story I ever wrote for Segfault, so it deserves something.
• 2001/03/02: Banner Ads Now Themselves Have Banner Ads. The second-favorite of my stories. It's the perfect condensation of the post-boom mentality in the lower end of the market, where sites like Segfault were firmly rooted.
• 2001/02/13: Bacon Lovers up in Arms Over Ximian Keyword Purchase. A surreal retelling of one of those two-day stories that no one remembers a week later (hell, no one remembers Ximian anymore). Chosen because it's short and contains the first of only two Segfault mentions of Google.
• 2000/12/24: Tech Journalists Begin Work on Incompatible Linux Kernel. One of my favorites. The kind of trade press writing mocked in this article started around 1997 (despite what it says in the article) and I'd guess it let up around 2002. You still see it occasionally; not so much "Linux will fork" as the other stuff.
• 2000/12/15: Genetically Modified Teosinte on the Loose. Nowadays I'd be paid big money by some astroturf organization to write this kind of satire.
• 2000/08/08: Industry Unites Around Vague, Poorly-Defined Vision. My favorite of my Segfault stories. A focal point for my Segfault-era bêtes noires: corporate doublespeak, technological verbiage, bitter rivalries, a servile press, all backed up by the nagging feeling that none of it matters even a tiny bit.
• 2000/07/12: CARROT Reforms as STIC, Unveils Demographic Demands. A tragic story of the crash.
• 2000/07/09: 13-Year-Old 'r00ts' Popular Polynomial. This got picked up by Crypto-Gram and RISKS Digest, giving me a couple moments of fame. It's just math silliness, though it gets in some interesting pre-9/11 digs at security theater.
• 2000/05/14: FSF Violating the GPL? Pretty much a straight parody of 20 or 30 Slashdot stories, where breathlessness outranked cluefullness by a wide margin. Frederick Lee was a friend I was in college with at the time.
• 2000/02/23: "What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus?" - An Empirical Study. WILTGHBAB? was a common bogeyman among Concerned Nerds and the trade press. These days the phrase mostly turns up people talking about this article.
• 2000/01/05: Microsoft Knowledge Base: Not Installing Linux. My foray into Microsoft-bashing. My favorite Microsoft joke was making fun of how official Microspeak always used the full and complete names of the products complete with service pack number. But that joke could never really carry anything else. Oh, another joke I picked up as an editor was to use question marks instead of quotation marks when quoting Microsoft employees. Smart quotes, y'see. I'm fairly confident nobody at all saw that joke.
• 1999/12/16: Linux and the Use-Mention Distinction. Terrible headline. A story about the then-common technique of attempting to save your flailing dot-com company by hitching it to the Linux bandwagon with a speech act. The strange last paragraph about mowing the lawn is making fun of something ESR wrote about the VA IPO.
• 1999/10/31: DST Bug Causes Widespread Panic. Self-explanatory. I like the incongrous descent into city politics at the end.
• 1999/10/11: Netscape 4.8 to Feature More Bugs, Useless Crap. Probably the most accurate story Segfault ever published.
• 1999/10/07: Thermodynamic catastrophe looms; insane number of "Linux Myths" rebuttals blamed. There really was this super defensive pile-on effect. It was an extremely useless time-waster in a crowded field of useless ways of wasting time, and it lasted well into 2001, as my final Segfault story demonstrates. Nowadays you mainly see this behavior in the political realm. The "Linux Myths" page is long gone, as is Windows NT, but if you're curious here's a page from Linux Weekly News that quotes some of it.
• 1999/09/16: Press Release Successfully Disguised as News Article. Self-explanatory. I like the made-up headlines from other publications.
• 1999/07/05: Calling All Investors. Lame headline, good story. My dot-com reductio.
• 1999/04/15: NT outperforms self on same hardware. Another thing that was a huge deal at the time but now who cares, or even remembers? Microsoft paid off some folks to do a rigged demo, and they really did find some problems with Linux. This semi-funny story was the result, or more accurately one of about a billion results, most of them totally pointless. The only useful result was that the problems with Linux got fixed. It's not a great story but it's historical, it's short, and it's got a graphic.
• 1999/04/12: Jabba the Hutt offers bounty on XSL implementation. Silliness, based on the ubiquitous use of "bounty" in press coverage of Sun's similar move. Sometimes I still say the Jabba lines from this story in a booming Jabba voice. Not when other people are around.
• 1998/11/19: Media Watch: Coverage of SuSE, Red Hat support announcements. The first in my "awful headline" series. One of the standard 1990s arguments against using Linux was that you couldn't buy support for it. Like most such arguments it was more a defense mechanism than a real argument, so the fact that you could pay for support did nothing to dispel it. Today I read a weblog entry that said something like "So you're thinking of installing Linux. Oracle and Red Hat give you all the enterprise cred you need, but what about X?" X being some trivial thing. Concerned Nerds would have wept to have read that sentence in 1998. But they would have found the word "cred" a little odd.
• 1998/09/14: Security Alert: Bug Found in GNU Acronym. Good idea but not as funny as I remember. This was reprinted in a humor section on gnu.org for a couple of years, which I thought was quite the deal, and you can still find it elsewhere on the web. Since Jake Berendes's name is in the body of the story and mine is just in the metadata (Jake helped me with the Esperanto), he usually gets more credit for this story than I do.
• 1998/08/11: "Microsoft stole my pants", alleges Caldera CEO. I wanted to include one of my very first stories, and this one at least had a funny headline. This was probably the second story I wrote for Segfault. The first was an extended riff on the pun "Open Sores". I used to think that was a hilarious story and that anyone else who used that joke had ripped it off from me, but I just read it and it's not that good, and these days no one even bothers to rip off the joke anymore. So mellow out, earlier version of myself.

I also wrote three stories for Be Dope, the boom-era geek humor site whose archives are still online. Here they are:

• 2001/01/11: eVilla vs. Godzilla. Great stuff. Unfortunately, the crash came long before I ever got the idea to put Godzilla's mission statement on my own business cards. PS: I can't believe I actually researched the name of the biologist to quote in the story. PPS: I can't believe I just looked it up again to see if that's what I did.
• 2000/07/25: Be's Tim Self Deallocated in Freak Accident. Takes about as many liberties with Squeak programming as the average SF movie takes with science.
• 1999/07/01: Be Assures Users: Your Ass is Safe. The Jean-Louis Gassée quote has aged well, like a fine wine.