www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted
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It's census night here in Oz. Time to try out the online census form that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has been at pains to convince as many people as possible to use this year instead of filling in the paper form.
So can http://www.census.abs.gov.au/ handle the load it should have been designed to expect?
Can it fuck. Right now it's got cooties that make
look reliable.
You'd think that a department whose sole reason for existence is crunching numbers would be capable of setting up a high-capacity data collection server... unless you were a regular TDWTF reader. Then you'd expect to see exactly what's happening here.
Paper forms it is then.
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Census 2016: Error messages hinder completion of online census
People trying to complete the census online have been met with error messages and told the system is "overloaded".
My goodness, who could possibly have seen this coming?
On Tuesday evening, a Census spokesman said the online system was operating "as expected".
Heh.
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They improved it:
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@Deadfast half credit. Personally, I'm waiting for
504 OK!
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Incidentally, according to anecdotal evidence one could have completed the census several days ago. That is certainly not what the letter I received suggests:
Please complete the Census on Tuesday, 9 August 2016.
"On" is not the same as "by". Whoever wrote that should surrender their Australian citizenship because they are clearly not proficient with English.
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@flabdablet said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
On Tuesday evening, a Census spokesman said the online system was operating "as expected".
Yeah, they probably expected it to fall over and die :P .
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@Deadfast No, they really do mean "on". It's supposed to be as close as practicable to a point-in-time snapshot of the state of everybody.
"Please complete" doesn't mean "We will send the boys around to break your legs if you don't complete". It's just what they'd rather you did.
If you complete it early you're supposed to use answers that you expect will apply on Census Night. If you complete it late, you're supposed to use answers that did apply on Census Night.
Most people do in fact fill in the form on Census Night and that's what the online version should have been scaled for.
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@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
they probably expected it to fall over and die
Hence "heh."
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@flabdablet said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Most people do in fact fill in the form on Census Night and that's what the online version should have been scaled for.
I wonder why that could be. If you don't want 24 million people practically DDoSing your website, perhaps you should word your letter a bit more carefully.
@flabdablet said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
No, they really do mean "on". It's supposed to be as close as practicable to a point-in-time snapshot of the state of everybody.
That's irrelevant in the context of the bloody invitation. This is a detail that could very well be explained on the form itself.
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@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
If you don't want 24 million people practically DDoSing your website, perhaps you should
use MongoDB!
It's web scale!
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HustonCanberra, we have progress:
Oooh, poor system!
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@r10pez10 That's the licenses for… well, something, but who was actually doing the load testing?
Apart from the Australian public, of course.
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@r10pez10
They spelled WTF wrong under State/Territory ...
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@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Your patience and cooperation are appreciated [code 9]
So... Disney shows are bringing you error messages now?
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@dkf said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
but who was actually doing the load testing?
IBM. Aparently.
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@dkf said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
@r10pez10 That's the licenses for… well, something, but who was actually doing the load testing?
Apart from the Australian public, of course.
That says someone was paid to load tests. It does not state whether or not the load test was performed, let alone whether or not it passed.
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@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Incidentally, according to anecdotal evidence one could have completed the census several days ago. That is certainly not what the letter I received suggests:
Please complete the Census on Tuesday, 9 August 2016.
"On" is not the same as "by". Whoever wrote that should surrender their Australian citizenship because they are clearly not proficient with English.
Neither are the Australians.
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@Polygeekery said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Incidentally, according to anecdotal evidence one could have completed the census several days ago. That is certainly not what the letter I received suggests:
Please complete the Census on Tuesday, 9 August 2016.
"On" is not the same as "by". Whoever wrote that should surrender their Australian citizenship because they are clearly not proficient with English.
Neither are the Australians.
Says the American :P
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Twenty minutes to midnight on Census Night and things are looking up. At least the page loads now.
Code 9... ah yes. Code 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long-distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands of recently dead load balancers. Have you implemented any of this code as yet?
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We had a similar thing. The government made the long form census mandatory again, so the online census site got overwhelmed.
Of course, the government spun this as, 'so many Canadians are doing the census omg!', but the truth appears to be something else...
Internal reports say design flaws not traffic volume behind crash of census website | CBC News
Some Canadians trying to file census questionnaires online May 2 were frustrated by webpage outages, which Statistics Canada suggested were due to traffic volumes. But internal documents show hidden design flaws in the system were the real problem.
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@bb36e The system's fundamental design flaws were almost completely obscured by its superficial design flaws!
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@bb36e At least they admit it's their fault. The ABS claims it was them haxxxorz:
ABS blames overseas hacking attack for census night shambles
The Australian Bureau of Statistics says it believes a series of hacking attacks which led to the census website being shut down last night were part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the national survey.
"It was an attack, and we believe from overseas," he said. [...] "The online census form was subject to four denial of service attacks yesterday," he explained. [...] "The first three caused minor disruption, but more than 2 million forms were successfully submitted and safely stored.
Here's my idea of how this "malicious" DDoS attack happened: 2 million people came home from work early and filled out the census. Then the remaining 13 million did and tried to do the same.
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@flabdablet said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Code 9... ah yes. Code 9 deals with the resurrection of the dead. Long-distance electrodes shot into the pineal and pituitary glands of recently dead load balancers. Have you implemented any of this code as yet?
Visits?
That would indicate... visitors!
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@Deadfast said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Here's my idea of how this "malicious" DDoS attack happened: 2 million people came home from work early and filled out the census. Then the remaining 13 million did and tried to do the same.
But they believe it was from overseas. My theory is that their server went to shit, and then a bunch of australians flocked to social media and forums to talk about how shit the website is, and then people all over the world tried to check out the site and see how shit it is.
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@Fox That or they're just bullshitting. I just found this little gem about what the system was tested for:
Asked about the ability of the online census database to cope with such high traffic numbers, an ABS spokesman said online could handle "1,000,000 form submissions every hour. That's twice the capacity we expect to need."
No, you idiot, that's 15 times less than you needed. You're making the assumption that the load would be evenly spread across 24 hours. This isn't statistics, you can't just randomly average shit.
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@PleegWat said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
It does not state whether or not the load test was performed, let alone whether or not it passed.
TESTED IN A LABORATORY
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@ben_lubar said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
TESTED IN A LABORATORY
Warning: that website was found to cause cancer in rats in California.
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A census taker once tried to test his website. I put him on the front page with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
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@Fox It looks like there really were some DDoS attacks in the morning (mainly from the USA), with minor effects. After that they turned on geo-blocking which helped for most of the day. In the evening there was a bigger DDoS attack, the geo-blocking failed, and a router also died. At that point they chose to take the site down (without telling anybody of course).
Sources here, with plenty more available.
It doesn't seem to have been a capacity problem:
The Minister said at its peak the Census was taking 150 forms a second, despite being equipped to deal with up to 260 a second.
At the same time, the fact that their site didn't have any kind of information on it other than "the site is experiencing high volumes, please try again in 15 minutes" was not helpful. (That's if you could get onto it at all. I couldn't at first; being in the west, I didn't get home until after the site had been taken down.) Their main site didn't have any kind of message about the issue. I didn't try the phone help line but those who did tell me it was completely swamped.
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Oh, here's something fun from an article last week on the census:
The limitations of the IBM-developed online system used for next Tuesday's Australian Census are becoming clearer, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics telling ZDNet that the fields for first names and surnames can only handle ASCII printable characters.
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Article here saying there was no particular sign of a DDoS attack. Read "endintiers" comment, seems like a reasonable guess.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
can only handle ASCII printable characters
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According to the ABS, 2.33 million online forms were submitted prior to the site outage, with 3 million households opting for the paper form.
3 million households are feeling pretty smug today... that's actually about a third of the total, I guess it would have been even worse if they'd all been trying to submit online too.
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@flabdablet said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
It's supposed to be as close as practicable to a point-in-time snapshot of the state of everybody.
Is that really important? Can't they just ask "were there any deaths, births, or religious conversions on your family between 9 August and today"?
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Article here saying there was no particular sign of a DDoS attack. Read "endintiers" comment, seems like a reasonable guess.
Yeah, I don't believe that excuse for a second.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Article here saying there was no particular sign of a DDoS attack. Read "endintiers" comment, seems like a reasonable guess.
What really bothers me is this:
Kalisch has been quoted as saying that the Australian Signals Directorate has been asked to track the source of the attack. He might as well start looking for an unicorn.
It seems like an unicorn is the right way to write it, but it just sounds wrong in my head. I'm pretty sure it's a unicorn.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
the fields for first names and surnames can only handle ASCII printable characters.
checks calendar to see if it's 1983 again.
Well, at least it wasn't EBCDIC...
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@dangeRuss said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
It seems like an unicorn is the right way to write it, but it just sounds wrong in my head. I'm pretty sure it's a unicorn.
It depends purely on how you pronounce it. If the noun starts with a vowel sound then you use
an, and if it starts with a consonant sound you usea. It's an easy rule, but it does mean that there are words where different people correctly use different indefinite articles for it and neither would be correct to switch to the other.
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@ScholRLEA said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Well, at least it wasn't EBCDIC...
How do you know it wasn't being converted internally? And then converted back and forth a few times because of the layers of compatibility shims. :(
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@dkf Sadly, given some of the things IBM has done before, that's all too plausible.
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@ScholRLEA said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
that's all too plausible
I know. I've worked with Highly-Paid Consultants and IBM systems in the past too.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
3 million households are feeling pretty smug today... that's actually about a third of the total, I guess it would have been even worse if they'd all been trying to submit online too.
Is there a penalty for not filling it out?
Because if I tried to use the website and it didn't work, I'd just say "eh, fuck it" and move on with my life. But then again, Aussies get fined if they don't vote, so maybe they get fined for skipping census too?
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@blakeyrat said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Is there a penalty for not filling it out?
There's plenty of reportage about $180/day fines but AFAICT that's all bullshit. In any case this year's exercise has been such a comprehensive fustercluck that they'd probably DDOS the courts by attempting to enforce such regulations as do exist.
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@flabdablet Is there anything in your entire country that's not mandatory?
"You didn't clean your gutters this year! That's a $400 fine!"
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@blakeyrat "You're still using a car with a manual transmission. You must pay to have it junked and buy a new car. Have a nice day, slave."
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@blakeyrat said in www.census.abs.gov.au self-slashdotted:
Is there anything in your entire country that's not mandatory?
I'ma let Jim splain this one you.
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@flabdablet Dood. I get he's a comedian but you guys get fined if you don't participate in voting. That's not freedom.
Australian national census fails in the IBM cloud
