Segfault (1998–2001) was a popular
humor
Humour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) or humor (American English) is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humorism, humoral medicine of the ancient Gre ...
website that posted
fake news reports on
hacker-related topics on a near-daily basis. The range of topics was approximately the same as that covered and regularly discussed on the
Slashdot — including
free software,
Internet phenomena,
computer programming, and
technology in general. The name "segfault" refers to the
segmentation fault, a
computer
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...
software error.
Most stories were written and submitted by the site's readers. The site itself was run by
Scott James Remnant
Scott James Remnant (born 18 July 1980) is an open source software engineer. Scott served as a long-time Debian developer until 2006 and worked as "Ubuntu Developer Manager" on the Ubuntu Linux distribution at Canonical Ltd. He now works at Googl ...
, who later went on to work on Ubuntu and
ChromeOS, and Leonard Richardson. One famous name in the contributor list is
Peter Norvig, who submitted the story "Songwriters, Publishers Sue Themselves".
In late 2001, the site shut down after losing its
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...
. Attempts to relocate the site to a new host failed, as it turned out that the
database containing all the stories had been lost and that there were no
backup
In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...
s available. The segfault.org domain has subsequently shown messages about the site's status; some have indicated a resurrection attempt being in progress, but nothing appears to have happened.
Some of the content has been recovered and is available via the
Internet Archive.
Stories
The following is an excerpt from the Segfault story "Man clicks Internet
banner ad
A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking ...
":
Another Segfault story, "
Microsoft Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
Discovers New
Integer Between 5 and 6",
reported the following:
Trolling
Many of the
Slashdot trolling phenomena posts started out on Segfault. During its earlier days, Segfault would allow anybody viewing the site to comment upon the stories therein. Such comments were visible to any other visitors to the site, and initially tended to expand upon the themes within the story and add to the humor. However, as time went on more of the posts were troll posts (such as ''naked and petrified'' posts) which added little to the site. However, Segfault lacked any mechanism to remove trolls and their posts – unlike
Slashdot and its
moderation system, or
Wikipedia's system of peer review.
As a result, the comments became ever more offensive. Eventually the operator of Segfault was forced to disable the comment feature.
See also
*
The Onion
References
External links
Original home page(now redirects to a private blog)
Recovered storiesfrom the Internet Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Segfault (Website)
Defunct websites
British comedy websites
Internet properties established in 1998