Census - 9 August 2016

[Craton]

...and I'm done.

@ bellenuit. Thanks for your insight.

FWIW. Digital attack maps:

Jul 9th: http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=16990&view=map

Jul 19th: http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=17000&view=map

Aug 9th: http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=17021&view=map

 

[drsmith]

I still can't get past the Complete my Census front page.

 

[bellenuit]

I still can't get past the Complete my Census front page.

I'm done too. Easy as pie once it runs for you.

 

[Craton]

I still can't get past the Complete my Census front page.

Probably pointless but have you refreshed your browser Doc?

From the Census site:

The Census website is now available

We apologise for the inconvenience and thank everyone for their patience.

 

[Gringotts Bank]

Governments can't do anything properly can they? That's really the issue - their widespread and repeated incompetence.

Whether it's a schools building program, the pink bats scandal, $1000 cash handouts to stimulate the economy, failed intelligance (WMD), ASIO being hacked and sensitive data stolen by the Chinese (what a joke!), budgets repeatedly blown up, and now the census, ... Could go on and on.

They just suck. Left/right/Green. Politicians are just sucky, incompetent fwits. And big business knows how to take them for a ride and ensure everything goes over budget.

 

[SirRumpole]

Governments can't do anything properly can they? That's really the issue - their widespread and repeated incompetence.

Whether it's a schools building program, the pink bats scandal, $1000 cash handouts to stimulate the economy, failed intelligance (WMD), ASIO being hacked and sensitive data stolen by the Chinese (what a joke!), budgets repeatedly blown up, and now the census, ... Could go on and on.

They just suck. Left/right/Green. Politicians are just sucky, incompetent fwits. And big business knows how to take them for a ride and ensure everything goes over budget.

Unfortunately quite correct. Which is why we have idiots like Trump and Hanson taking the populist position and conning people into thinking they could do a better job, when in fact their ignorance is so appalling that they would make a worse stuff up than the last lot

Should we just let public servants run the country ? At least the PS has some expertise in it which, if unadulterated by political pressures may actually make some correct decisions.

It's the constant striving by politicians to differentiate themselves from "the other side" that causes most of these problems. I heard Morrison today trying to blame Labor for the census stuff up. What a sick pathetic joke the man is and most like him.

 

[drsmith]

A piece this afternoon in the AFR,

Information has begun to emerge about the confluence of events that led the ABS and IBM to take the site down on census night, which show IBM and ABS staff misinterpreted data and were spooked by fears of a damaging data breach following a fairly standard security threat known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The website problems were initially blamed on the DDoS attack, which would have made the site inaccessible to users by bombarding it with thousands of logins at once.

However, it was later confirmed that the ABS and IBM decided to take the site down due to security concerns

IBM has failed to explain publicly what happened. It put out a statement on Thursday evening simply saying it regretted the inconvenience concerned, thanking the ABS for its support and saying no data had been compromised.

Security insights

Security industry insiders have meanwhile flooded social media with insights into what went wrong.

Well-respected technology security specialist publisher Patrick Gray detailed a chain of events whereby IBM and the ABS are claimed to have declined the offer of DDoS prevention services from their networking provider NextGen Networks, believing they wouldn't need them.

The site was subsequently hit by DDoS attacks. However, it is said that IBM's systems analysts were later mistaken in believing they had detected census data being stolen by overseas hackers, when in fact it was either people logging in from overseas or simply using VPNs.

They believed the earlier DDoS was a tactic by hackers to distract them from the data theft and shut everything down.

Lawyers spoken to by The Australian Financial Review said legal action against IBM was a possibility, but it would likely be a tough fight for the ABS or the government to prove it was entirely culpable.

"The census site failing does not necessarily mean IBM's service was valueless and that money has to be repaid, but depending on the agreements with IBM and other contractors, there may well be liability if they failed to meet their obligations around system security and stability," Roland Müller of Parke Lawyers said.

http://www.afr.com/technology/ibm-under-fire-as-census-blame-game-starts-20160811-gqqkdu

Probably pointless but have you refreshed your browser Doc?

I'm on a different PC now, same router/landline internet.

The following page is the one I can't get past.

https://stream10.census.abs.gov.au/eCensusWeb/welcome.jsp#top2

When I click on Complete my Census, it opens up the same page on a new web browser page. Clicking on the same link on that page just refreshes that page.

If worst comes to the worst, I'll try from a different internet account.

 

[Boggo]

I wonder if they have a $705,000 per annum exec approving a taxpayer funded $10m contract to supply the computing system for this !

They may as well try again I guess, after all it is just (someone else's) money

http://www.petcensus.com.au/

 

[Logique]

One of the news networks said tonight, that some of the the paper envelopes are being returned to the senders, as Australia Post misread the bar codes.

 

[Smurf1976]

Politicians are just sucky, incompetent fwits. And big business knows how to take them for a ride and ensure everything goes over budget.

That's exactly how it works and it's why government getting involved with private business tends to not work out too well from the taxpayer's perspective. It's a great deal for business though.

 

[Smurf1976]

Should we just let public servants run the country ? At least the PS has some expertise in it which, if unadulterated by political pressures may actually make some correct decisions.

Having worked in the (state) PS as such, my observation is that the ability and knowledge of public servants is greatly underrated by the media and general community. It's not bad at all. Presumably the Commonwealth PS would be similar?

The trouble is that at a certain level of seniority the political influence takes over and as with any workplace, it's those at the top who ultimately call the shots. That's where the truly dumb things are forced in (and "forced" tends to be the correct term there - they know full well it will cost more and won't work as well but it's forced in regardless for political reasons).

I've seen some truly first class work done in the PS. I've also seen it all dumped in favour of paying someone external serious $ for a greatly inferior result. $5K one-off to do it "in house" with all costs accounted for (even including overheads on staff) replaced with $15K, twice, to outsource it and former colleagues tell me that to this day it has never worked. Politics is the reason, the PS workers would gladly have just done it themselves if they were allowed to.

 

[SirRumpole]

Having worked in the (state) PS as such, my observation is that the ability and knowledge of public servants is greatly underrated by the media and general community. It's not bad at all. Presumably the Commonwealth PS would be similar?

The trouble is that at a certain level of seniority the political influence takes over and as with any workplace, it's those at the top who ultimately call the shots. That's where the truly dumb things are forced in (and "forced" tends to be the correct term there - they know full well it will cost more and won't work as well but it's forced in regardless for political reasons).

I've seen some truly first class work done in the PS. I've also seen it all dumped in favour of paying someone external serious $ for a greatly inferior result. $5K one-off to do it "in house" with all costs accounted for (even including overheads on staff) replaced with $15K, twice, to outsource it and former colleagues tell me that to this day it has never worked. Politics is the reason, the PS workers would gladly have just done it themselves if they were allowed to.

If you get outside sources to do something they have to spend half the time talking to the staff to find out what's actually needed, whereas as you say the staff can do it themselves at a fraction of the cost and time because they know what needs to be done.

I was in the same situation myself. I wrote a computer system that worked (at a cost of just my salary) then it was hived off to consultants to re-write at 5 times the cost, and I'm not sure if it's been implemented yet 5 years after I left.

 

[banco]

Why is the fact that the ABS seems to have mislead the public about what caused the meltdown not getting more attention? You have IT people saying it wasn't a DDOS and the system would have fallen over from legitimate traffic because it was built with insufficient capacity.

 

[SmokeyGhost]

Oh bloody dear. Possibly the members of this particular group should be included in the "Also God's Children" category and and data they may provide relegated to the dustbin of outliers.

Census 2016: Many Australians confused Sensis with census

While millions of Australians were unable to log on to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Census website on Tuesday night, thousands of other users met with similar frustration after misspelling the name of the national survey.

Sensis, the company that owns White Pages, said it was inundated with traffic from users mistaking sensis.com.au for census.abs.gov.au.

Traffic to the Sensis website spiked 271 per cent on the same time the previous week, and White Pages executive general manager, Stephen Palmer said they were flooded with messages from angry users.

 

[drsmith]

I'm on a different PC now, same router/landline internet.

The following page is the one I can't get past.

https://stream10.census.abs.gov.au/eCensusWeb/welcome.jsp#top2

When I click on Complete my Census, it opens up the same page on a new web browser page. Clicking on the same link on that page just refreshes that page.

If worst comes to the worst, I'll try from a different internet account.

I wonder whether the following might be the issue,

A geoblock, or system used to limit internet access based on a user's location, on the census website is also causing issues for some users, IT consultant Justin Warren said.

"[The site] pretty much all lives in one place behind a wall," he said.

"What they have seemed to have done is they have put some holes in the wall to allow you to come in if you're from Australia, and you're not from Australia you can't come in."

Metadata retention dodgers among those affected

Mr Warren said the geoblock "had some unintended consequences unfortunately".

He said one of the issues people seem to be having was with Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

The other issue has been with the Domain Name System (DNS) — the part of the internet that translates the www. domain name to an IP address, so the computer can connect to the web server.

But because the ABS has geoblocked international traffic, they also appear to have blocked DNS servers hosted overseas.

"The traffic that goes over there can't find the DNS for the census site, as far as your computer is concerned the census site doesn't exist," Mr Warren said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-12/census-2016-site-up-and-running-in-australia/7722738

I'm however going through a land line router purchased through a major ISP and I'm not hiding behind a VPN.

I've since tried through a mobile phone account and was able to get to the login page to enter the 12-digit code. I didn't enter the code at that point but rather tried again through the router and then again through the mobile account with both attempts unsuccessful.

It would appear from the mobile experience above that a person only gets one attempt to access the census login from a specific internet enabled device so I'm back to square one.

I have one more option through another connection which I'll be trying later today. If That fails, I'll have to ring the number on the letter I got from the ABS and request a paper form.

 

[SirRumpole]

I have one more option through another connection which I'll be trying later today. If That fails, I'll have to ring the number on the letter I got from the ABS and request a paper form.

Good to see you are a good citizen and trying everything you can to get it done rather that telling the ABS to pi$$ off which I think a lot of people will do.

 

[wayneL]

Why is the fact that the ABS seems to have mislead the public about what caused the meltdown not getting more attention? You have IT people saying it wasn't a DDOS and the system would have fallen over from legitimate traffic because it was built with insufficient capacity.

Because nobody believed it anyway

 

[pixel]

Good to see you are a good citizen and trying everything you can to get it done rather that telling the ABS to pi$$ off which I think a lot of people will do.

"When was that meant to be? The 9th??? Sorry, I can't remember."

 

[Gringotts Bank]

:guitar:

Rock out to this. Best ending to a movie.

 

[Knobby22]

Why is the fact that the ABS seems to have mislead the public about what caused the meltdown not getting more attention? You have IT people saying it wasn't a DDOS and the system would have fallen over from legitimate traffic because it was built with insufficient capacity.

You don't really know that for sure.
And anyway, we expected incompetency.
Clever country..pah!

They are building overpasses for train crossings in Victoria at present, one crossing has a handicapped ramp only. You have to walk nearly a kilometre to cross over the track! No stairs!

I work with architects, there is now no such thing as a disabled access toilet, it is now a Unisex toilet (to portray it is suitable for non genders, what the????, still used for disabled).

This country is starting to disappear up its own ****.