Census 2016

Lots of legitimate privacy concerns about the census. These articles provide a nice summary but I've also seen it suggested that if you do it online your info will pass through US based IBM servers and therefore become subject to the patriot act.

Personally I’ve asked to be sent a paper form.

Go nuts tin foil haters

So you are saying if I have a website based on us servers it’s subject to the patriot act? Even though I’m not a patriot? Where’s the bomberblitz host @Riolo?

Lots of legitimate privacy concerns about the census. These articles provide a nice summary but I've also seen it suggested that if you do it online your info will pass through US based IBM servers and therefore become subject to the patriot act.

Personally I’ve asked to be sent a paper form.

Go nuts tin foil haters

So you are saying if I have a website based on us servers it’s subject to the patriot act? Even though I’m not a patriot? Where’s the bomberblitz host @Riolo?

Yes that’s what he’s saying. As the server is on USA soil.

Lots of legitimate privacy concerns about the census. These articles provide a nice summary but I've also seen it suggested that if you do it online your info will pass through US based IBM servers and therefore become subject to the patriot act.

Personally I’ve asked to be sent a paper form.

Go nuts tin foil haters

So you are saying if I have a website based on us servers it’s subject to the patriot act? Even though I’m not a patriot? Where’s the bomberblitz host @Riolo?

Yes that’s what he’s saying. As the server is on USA soil.

Hmmm. Best I read the patriot act then. Or change my hosting.

They still got their money and will get more next time.

Nice work if you can get it, isn’t it?

Lots of legitimate privacy concerns about the census. These articles provide a nice summary but I've also seen it suggested that if you do it online your info will pass through US based IBM servers and therefore become subject to the patriot act.

Personally I’ve asked to be sent a paper form.

Go nuts tin foil haters

So you are saying if I have a website based on us servers it’s subject to the patriot act? Even though I’m not a patriot? Where’s the bomberblitz host @Riolo?

Yes that’s what he’s saying. As the server is on USA soil.

Hmmm. Best I read the patriot act then. Or change my hosting.

In my experience, panthur.com.au is good.

Verified now, that the site was attempted to be hacked,... 4 times!!

The 4th attack they couldn’t hold off, … so were forced to shut the site down

Attacks were coming from overseas.

There’s no way that’s remotely true.

Correct.

Absolutely no evidence of an attack.
Exactly 0 large or unusual DDoS attacks on Australian sites in the past 72 hrs.

It’s a bare face lie.

I don't think it's a lie. My guess would be a software or network engineer (who are incapable of applying context to anything) would have reported a "higher number of requests than anticipated" caused the service to fall over, and then a manager (who are incapable of applying the correct context to anything) would have interpreted that as "DDoS attack" rather than "users trying to do what they're supposed to do"

Having worked with various high end software engineers over the years, I reckon that their design brief said something like “12 million users on a single day”, which they divided by 24 and figured 500k per hour is sufficient, and not at any point questioned at what time during the day the users might actually do it given they are human beings who attend to various other matters at different times of day, and not just some unit of calculation.

Software engineers tend to be very, very good at software engineering, and absolutely nothing else.

Similar to people talking about blaming the company doing the load testing. But they just would have tested for the load they were told to test for in the test plan. And it was probably the “12 million in a single day” as opposed to 8 million between 19.00 and 23.00 or whatever. Who wrote the test plan, and who developed the contingency plan, and who signed off on them is the real question.

https://vimeo.com/178750827
Huw Parkinson’s take on censusfail

I'm planning to put a fake name in the online version tonight. Not an obviously fake name (Homer Simpson etc), but fake none the less.

Are you saying Homer Simpson is a fake?

@randommuz - that was a brilliant way to start Sunday morning. There’s been some great work there this year.

If we've got until September why the hell did they push everyone to the site on one night.

Because it’s supposed to be about your exact situation on that date. Never mind that they set it up to cope with no more than one mill in traffic, had a pretty good idea it would crash and most of it is already known. The context is, are you feeling religious in a certain way or have this many children on X day.

Would everyone being on the NBN have helped?

Could they have included the same-sex marriage question/s in the census rather than pay extra money for a plebiscite later this year? The PM has already said it will be non-binding for MPs, so it’s effectively just a statistic-gathering exercise anyway. Could have thrown in a couple of other current social topics as well like renewable energy/climate change, etc. That way they could have some actual stats on what the population thinks rather than assuming that voting for a specific political party means you fully support all their policies and fundamentally disagree with all the policies of their political opponents. I know it’s not that concise for me when I vote.

Or am I being too logical?

Could they have included the same-sex marriage question/s in the census rather than pay extra money for a plebiscite later this year? The PM has already said it will be non-binding for MPs, so it's effectively just a statistic-gathering exercise anyway. Could have thrown in a couple of other current social topics as well like renewable energy/climate change, etc. That way they could have some actual stats on what the population thinks rather than assuming that voting for a specific political party means you fully support all their policies and fundamentally disagree with all the policies of their political opponents. I know it's not that concise for me when I vote.

Or am I being too logical?

FGtM for PM.

Not sure I’d bother asking the great unwashed about things that require scientific knowledge and powers of analysis, considering most people would only “know” what they’re told by an untrustworthy media or an even more untrustworthy internet.

Not sure I'd bother asking the great unwashed about things that require scientific knowledge and powers of analysis, considering most people would only "know" what they're told by an untrustworthy media or an even more untrustworthy internet.

LOL. I agree. But what is the point of democracy?

I say we should go with Plato’s model - philosopher kings.

No, that’s what the election is for, they tell us what they want to do, and we get to choose. Unfortunately they fail to execute. Rudd failed on climate issues, Tony failed on plenty of promises.

The Government has reached a confidential settlement with computer giant IBM for costs after the census website crashed earlier this year, leaving millions of Australians unable to lodge their forms.

The 40-hour outage was caused by four Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that have been the subject of a blame game between the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and contractors for months.

they sure these DDoS aren’t just everyone in aus trying to log in?