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Australian census website crashes ...

psionl0

Skeptical about skeptics
psionl0
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Australia's 5 yearly census is the first time that Australians had to fill out online (although people could still get a paper form on request).

In spite of the Australian Bureau of Statistics promising that it could handle the demand and spending $325,000 to test the load on the system, the website crashed tonight under the weight of the traffic. At this stage, it will be tomorrow at least before people can log onto the web site. Regardless, the ABS is still running ads urging people to complete their census "tonight".

This failure has heightened concerns about privacy given that people have to put their names on the forms.

Australians have until September 23 to complete the census on line. Hopefully, that will be enough time for the website to be fixed.

This is how The Australian reported it: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...d/news-story/1febee892e1ab043c0e7682c7a3485a4

This failure has gone wild in Twitter with the hashtag #CensusFail getting a lot of comments

Here is a comment from journalist Peter Van Olsen: https://twitter.com/vanOnselenP/status/762978387887468545
(I'm not sure that you can hot link to pictures on Twitter)
 
I did mine on Monday morning. No problems at all. It took about 10 minutes.

Norm
 
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It is still down. It was reported that the site was hacked. If that is the case then I regret not giving them a slightly incorrect name. Then if I get a letter (read spam) with that spelling of my name then I know it came from them. By the way why do they even want names for? Initials or first name should be enough.
 
Xenophon's paranoia is ridiculous. The census has your name and address? Shock, horror. Good thing he doesn't have a tax file number then.....

Unless you live in a cave without internet access, your name and address is all over the web. That level of privacy is obsolete, and nearly all of us can live with this.
 
rjh01 said:
It is still down. It was reported that the site was hacked. If that is the case then I regret not giving them a slightly incorrect name. Then if I get a letter (read spam) with that spelling of my name then I know it came from them. By the way why do they even want names for? Initials or first name should be enough.
Click to expand...


After I found the site was using the conartist trick of "establish trust by repeating the mark's name", I regretted not calling myself Rufus T Flywheel
 
It is still down. I would have thought that a denial of service attack would only keep it down for a few hours, not a full day.

Whoever is responsible for the site being down should be given some sort of award.
 
arthwollipot said:
It's being kept down while the alleged attacks are being investigated by the Defence Signals Directorate.
Click to expand...

My prediction is that this will report it was done by overseas agents (probably Chinese or maybe Russian) and that they can do nothing about it except hope it does not happen again. Not at least with technology.
 
Lots of back-and-forth about if it was a hack or an attack or not. DSD say it was, minister says not. I suspect the site builders did load-testing but not "hardness" testing. Also, the site managers involved still don't seem to be able to tell a heavily overloaded site, which this site was, from a deliberate DoS attack.

And news report this morning saying PM says it will be back up later today. And he REALLY wants someone to blame.
 
How do you test a million people trying to access the service at the same time? I think also the advertising was bad. It should have said fill out the form any time during the week about Tuesday night.
 
rjh01 said:
How do you test a million people trying to access the service at the same time? I think also the advertising was bad. It should have said fill out the form any time during the week about Tuesday night.
Click to expand...
On a closed network for testing and with the right equipment and software, rather easily. Network gurus have been doing this for many a year.

But one product. There are many more with related features.

http://www.solarwinds.com/engineers-toolset/wan-killer
 
Damien Evans said:
My bet is their website failed and they're trying to save face.
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I suspect they WAY under configured it, because it was built to a price not a specification. And some contractor somewhere in an untouchable place happily signed off because they thought it was specified OK for a million single hits per day not 10 million sessions per hour, and no-one cross-checked their workings-out.

Honestly, I have seen this sort of thing happen here a lot recently, and the hard lesson learned is to ALWAYS follow up rigorously when someone says "Yes it does". Because often it doesn't.

Arse. Boot. Apply. Repeat.
 
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