{"id":4059,"date":"2013-06-06T14:24:24","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T18:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=4059"},"modified":"2013-06-06T14:56:47","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T18:56:47","slug":"listening-post-skirmishes-in-the-code-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2013\/06\/06\/listening-post-skirmishes-in-the-code-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening Post: Skirmishes in the Code War"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Hacker<\/a>

Hacker at work. Photo: Brian Klug<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have found ncpr.org a little hard to reach the last couple days. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4059"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4069,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4059\/revisions\/4069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}