Oh wow that’s weird. Stargate SG-1 also had an episode where a Lt. Tyler turned out to be an alien infiltrator in disguise: “The Fifth Man”.

When the first DVD cracking util was released, DeCSS, it violated the DMCA and people were getting sued and threatened with felonies for sharing it. Very quickly people figured out loopholes to make it an archivable creative work, like putting it on tshirts and encoding it as a prime number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

The first thing that comes to mind is Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/

Love this line from the wiki article: ‘A secretary he had interviewed for the piece said that a technical representative from Xerox had warned her "not to be afraid of the 914 because the machine would sense her fear and, like a mischievous child, misbehave."’

Pretty sure you’re thinking of tzdb, the time zone database: https://onezero.medium.com/the-largely-untold-story-of-how-one-guy-in-california-keeps-the-worlds-computers-on-the-right-time-a97a5493bf73

An adjacent and thematically resonant story is the volunteer effort that powers curl, which so many people use: https://thenewstack.io/the-world-runs-20-billion-instances-of-curl-wheres-the-support/

Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle weaves a lot of this into the plot. Nice to see someone following the thread.

You seem like someone who would be prepared if gravity reversed itself.