Listening Post: Skirmishes in the Code War

You may have found ncpr.org a little hard to reach the last couple days. A big old website is like my house, a big old house. It was built out from a central core over a long span of years. Some of the add-on builders had both budget and skills, some learned on the job, and some just had to make do with whatever was at hand to keep the rain out. As a consequence, some part of the structure is always in need of attention.

Yesterday, the site went down in a big way because we had forgotten about basic physics. A homeowner should know that the amount of stuff you bring into a house has to equal the amount of stuff you take out of the house. Otherwise you will eventually need a fancy new addition, or you will have an explosion. Yesterday, we had the explosion–and had to spend a lot of time on spring cleaning before we had enough room left to swing a cat, or post a new story. Oops.

Hacker at work. Photo: Brian Klug, Creative Commons, some rights reserved

Hacker at work. Photo: Brian Klug, Creative Commons, some rights reserved

But the day before that, we were also down multiple times. A hacker working through a server in China, maybe a subscriber to the theory that an older “house” wouldn’t have modern security, tried all the doors and windows at our community calendar–a couple hundred thousand times. While he/she/they didn’t get in, they did give the homeowner a brief nervous breakdown.

As an English major, I look at the whole shebang and wonder why any of it ever works. Somewhere out in the darkness, lit only by the sickly light of multiple monitors, geek fights geek endlessly in the shadows of the “code war.” Some are building locks, and some are shaping slim jims. Some have black hats, some white, some have been at their keyboards so long their hats are a dusty gray.

Maybe the final result of all that conflict is good. It gums up the works enough so that everything doesn’t move at the speed of light all the time, and mere mortals will have a little time left to smell roses and baby bottoms and share personal conversation and have lunch with friends. Cyberspace is (famously) infinite, but we are not. A breakdown is as good as a rest.

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7 Comments on “Listening Post: Skirmishes in the Code War”

  1. I just can’t get used to the idea of poet and webmaster in one human. But then every Thursday, I observe it again.

  2. J G King says:

    The code or cyber war has been kindled and one can only hope it does not grow to a conflagration. It makes sense that the Chinese would attempt to crack the small but not insignificant NCPR site. The NCPR web presence template has been picked up by a good number of other public radio stations. Find the weakness in the mother and you’ve got a good shot at all the clones. Should the war heat up, simultaneously taking down a bunch of national and local news sources in the emergency broadcast network could be a significant move within a battle.

  3. Emily-Jane says:

    I agree, yours is a wonderfully poetic and calm response to the bizarrities of cyber war…it seems there is a place for everything in this wonderful world!

  4. Alan says:

    Now I think of you as a steadfast guard at the castle gate of a minor medieval regional earldom. After dark. On a Tuesday.

  5. Dale Hobson says:

    JG–I love the idea of a global threat singling out NCPR’s website for its strategic value, but I have no reason to suppose that’s the case. The NCPR website is not a template used by other public radio stations. It’s architecture is a one-off, clinker-built by Bill Haenel, NCPR’s new media developer.

    We also have no way of telling whether this attack was part of any official Chinese hacking effort, or indeed whether it even originated in China. China is one-fifth of the world’s population and probably has about one-fifth of its computers. This could just as easily be a hacker from the US, or Europe, or anywhere, taking advantage of a Chinese computer to launch attacks elsewhere.

    That’s what makes hacking such a great topic for speculation. You often don’t really know what you think you know, and you have no practical way of finding out. Kind of maddening, really. Dale Hobson, NCPR

  6. Pete Klein says:

    I wonder if some computer geek is working on a real protection program that would destroy the computer of anyone who is trying to hack into another computer or web site. Kind of a “You kick on my door and my door will blow you up” system.

  7. Dale Hobson says:

    Pete–I don’t know if anyone is working on it, but many have long fantasizing about it. Something like the “black ice” security programs in the William Gibson cyberpunk science fiction novel “Neuromancer” that burn out the synapses of hackers using brain-computer interfaces. But probably just melting their computer would do. Dale

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