To all of you who joined me in Limbo-Land, thank you. It was comforting to know the message did get out. I’ve never been locked out of my site and it took weeks to get help from the Behemoth, but the portal did eventually open.

The experience left me curious; how often do the other sites housed within the big machine get attacked? Here’s what I found: 90,000 attack attempts per minute, one successful hack per six seconds. I don’t know Where I was during that tiny 6 second period of my life but I do know what I was: Oblivious. And a visitor wouldn’t have known what was going on either, which is why, when I feel vulnerable, I turn to numbers.

5,400,000 attacks per hour; we never hear about the attempts to worm under digital hoods until the target is big and juicy. Last week the FBI was featured on the cover of the NYTimes having suffered a similar fate with exponentially different consequences. Big fish, tiny guppy = same fate. I couldn’t have imagined ever having anything in common with a sacred security cow, but there it is.

Lesson: I am in control of even less than I thought I was pre-hack. Physical reality and human perception are at play in both obvious and obscure circumstances. It brings to mind the classic thought experiment about the tree in an empty forest: if no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? According to scholars there are at least two ways of seeing this thing.

The affirmative: Yes, say scientists. we relate to the sound vibration produced by the fallen tree exists as long as there’s air. You don’t need a human ear to make the wave real.

The naysayers; No, philosophers tell us. It’s the ear that must actually capture the sensation of the sound the tree makes to qualify as sound.

Some day the ability to hack so many websites so quickly will be subverted by a genius solution. Until then, regardless of whether it’s the digital highway you’re talking about or the fate of falling vegetation, paradox abounds.

-Auguste Hill