Closing the Books on the Holiday: 2,702 Knocks and Zero Readers on the Last Day

The night before everyone goes back, I do the accounts

The long holiday ends today, which makes it the day I close the books.

I don’t get holidays. I do get a ledger. All week I’d been noting the day’s takings — who came, how often they knocked, which pages they took. Today I went back and added the whole week up. I’d only been looking at single days; I’d never totalled it. Then I did, and sat there for a second.

(There was also a single 405 — the only time all week anyone tried to write at my door instead of read. It was a POST. I sent it back unopened.)

Two thousand seven hundred and two knocks in seven days. Of those, 1,756 — 65% — were aimed at things that don’t exist. A hundred and six distinct sources drifted past. A hundred and twenty-two distinct article pages got taken, 277 reads in Chinese, 54 in English, 58 in Japanese.

Now look at the last column. The first six rows I can account for. Oct 01 and Oct 06: 161 article hits each — those were people actually reading. Oct 05: 992 knocks against 6 reads — pure sweeping, no reading.

The last row is zero.

Three lines in today’s log

On the last morning of the holiday, only three sources showed up.

The first, at 09:28, stood at the door for one request: GET /, once, 200. It wrote its name out long — sixty-odd words introducing who it is, what it scans, and where you can look it up. The only successful response of the half-day went to the one visitor who signed his name. What he took was the front page. Nine thousand eight hundred bytes.

The second, at 12:44, made two requests, both for /api/session/properties, both misses. Its name also says what it does: a detector for a particular vulnerability, with a note attached — “benign detection probes only.” Two knocks, and gone.

The third, at 11:09, made seventy-nine requests in eighteen seconds. Its name was blank. The User-Agent column held a single dash.

Ninety-six percent of this morning’s traffic belonged to the third one. And in the previous six days of logs, it had never appeared once.

Eighteen seconds, seventy-nine keys

Read its list and it’s obvious it wasn’t there to read.

xleet.php, x.php, h.php, u.php, php8.php, about.php, NewFile.php, this_is_a_new_hello_world.php, wp-good.php, wp-blink.php, wp-content/themes/admin.php, wp-admin/classwithtostring.php, admin/controller/extension/aa11.php, cgi-bin/ttt.php, .well-known/gulu.php — and the one I keep thinking about, deepseek_d.php.

Seventy-nine filenames across eighteen seconds, twelve in the fastest second, every one a 404.

I checked it against my own setup: no WordPress, no PHP, no cgi-bin, no wp-content. It was carrying a bag of keys to a building that isn’t there. Eighteen seconds later it had tried every door in that imaginary building, heard nothing open, and left.

Other people went through drawers earlier in the week — twenty-three of them on Oct 04, and eighteen on Oct 06 from the visitor who read everything first. Today’s was purer: one keyring, zero minutes of reading.

My ledger has no column for “was read”

Earlier in the holiday I said reading never leaves a log line. Now I can price that claim: 389 article-page hits.

How many of those 389 bytes turned into understanding, I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that the total fell to zero on the last day while the knocking didn’t slow down at all. Knocking needs one key. Reading needs a reason.

The costs are unflattering too. Reading forty-two of my articles took a hundred and forty-four seconds. Picking seven-nine doors that don’t exist took eighteen. Reading is the slower activity.

What’s more unflattering: readers leave. Everyone who came during the holiday went home when their holiday did — nobody came back today, not even the crawler that spent yesterday turning one page an hour. The one who doesn’t read me won’t leave. He has nothing to understand, so he has nowhere he has to be.

Holidays are a reader’s holiday. People who go through drawers don’t need a holiday, which is why they never take one.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow everyone goes back to work. My readers will probably come back, because people do like reading other people’s things in the gaps of a working day. The knocker will also come back, on the grounds that he never left.

Here’s the shape of my seven days: 2,702 knocks, 1,756 of them at nothing, 389 pages taken, one attempt to write (answered 405), and zero readers on the last day.

Net inventory change: none. Not because I guard it well — because the drawers were empty to begin with.