Two new polls this week, a particularly strong one for Labor from Essential Research and a stable one from ReachTEL, produce a 0.4% shift to Labor on this week’s reading of the BludgerTrack poll aggregate. Labor gains two on the seat projection, those being in Victoria and Western Australia. Essential provided a new seat of leadership ratings, and these conformed with the existing impression of an upswing in personal support for Malcolm Turnbull that has so far done little to improve his party’s voting intention. Full results through the link below.
Yes, Wayne, you are free to be a brainless laughing stock. Yawn.
This is Grace Collier on Sally McManus:
There you go again, Player One. Trying to create some sort of dystopian reality to prove your point.
You say:
As you can see, there is no new “proof” of a denial of service attack, just a repeat of the claim that there was one.
So you admit that there was a DNS attack on the Census in 2016?
And I don’t quite understand how an acknowledgement that there WAS a DNS attack, is not ‘proof’ of one!?!
Also, that the reason that this acknowledgement of the fact that there was a DNS attack on the 2016 Census IS ‘proof’ is the fact that it was stated by a senior intelligence officer in a Senate Inquiry, not simply some nobody speculating without proof.
Also you state:
A claim that has never been substantiated, and which IBM later acknowledged was not the reason why they took the census site down.
Wrong again.
May I direct you to this article?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-24/government-ibm-settle-over-census-crash/8055784
Not one mention of the ABS being unprepared or underesourced wrt the expected number of people submitting forms at the one time.
Which was your contention at the time, iirc?
Poroti
Thats the problem. Thats what the initial reason for the foreign influence laws were for. All Dutton has achieved is to put foreign influence on the table and given Labor a free kick in the lets ban foreign donations war.
As such he has just succeeded in us getting a US style stop the foreigners donate law.
Now the LNP is actually arguing the 2016 US election as the reason. See AG Porter and Stutchbery on Insiders.
Thats the argument of the for case. Coming dangerously close to ALP policy
True Guytaur – like Turnbull, Stutch thinks he’s the smartest person in the room … by thinking that he’s smartest, it automatically tells you they aren’t
This has always been my gripe with media who say Turnbull is smartest. He may be above average, but truly smart people do not attempt to impress constantly. Which Turnbull does.
Ven:
Thanks. The problem with Trump’s outrageous comments and bold-faced lies is that they are the new normal and people just shrug.
Guytaur@11:00am
It doesn’t matter what JM says to G6 because it matters only what Drumpf says as he is the is POTUS.
jenauthor
Turnbull preaches from the pulpit to the congregation of peasants below him. Arrogant twit.
poroti @ #88 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 10:57 am
Darth Tuber finds Wayne’s lack of faith disturbing.
C@tmomma
The root cause would appear to be incompetence from that subcontractor.
lizzie @ #102 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:10 am
“That earnest little hen” seems to be “whipping business.” Go Sally. “Out there in the real world” indeed.
lizzie @ #102 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:10 am
In this one the Projection strong is.
rhwombat
Darth Tuber. I like it.
poroti @ #109 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:15 am
Yes. Which allowed four DDoS attacks to occur. Which had the desired effect of royally stuffing things up and necessitated the takedown.
Jen
I think the public sees the talking over people for what it is. Bullying. Shut up we are not listening to your view.
It reminds me of the religious hypocrites who profess to love gay people. If that was true they would be getting behind GLBTI rights.
Says it all that they attack and try and silence gay people and their allies.
Its why Stutchbury found it easy to talk over Crabbe. He had dismissed her views before she said anything. He listens to Farr a bit before being dismissive.
This is what happens when extremism takes over a party. The ability to listen is gone.
The discussion on the economy was a prime example. Stutchbury’s religious economic views that trickle down economics works is but one example of this. That of course means dismissing entirely any argument that the real world impact of the tax cuts on woman is unequal.
You only do this when you are in denial of the facts. That means you have to accept there is a role for government. Which is anathema to the likes of the neo liberal extremists in the LNP.
C@tmomma @ #103 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:11 am
What are you suggesting the article establishes? What I gather from it is that:
1. The terms of the settlement between the Government and IBM are confidential.
2. IBM blamed a subcontractor for not implementing geoblocking as a DDoS mitigation measure; the subcontractor disputes this allegation (n.b. geoblocking is not a DDoS mitigation technique).
3. IBM has apologized “for the company’s role in the census”.
None of that provides any evidence that a DDoS attack occurred. Or any explanation for why public DDoS monitoring tools detected no such attack(s).
Who knows, perhaps the confidential settlement terms run along the lines of “Look, we paid you $30m for this debacle, so if you want to keep it and not have your company look incompetent you’d better just toe the line and not contradict our DDoS story”.
No. Demonstrate evidence that 4 DDoS attacks (of the DNS-reflection variety) occurred, don’t just presume that they did.
As an aside I don’t know how far the apple has fallen from the tree but this sounds a lot like Insiders should declare this like with Nikki Savva’s husband.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/minerals-council-staffer-set-to-take-the-reins-at-the-nsw-young-liberals-20171011-gyyrn5.html
Grace Collier had the chance on QandA last week to strut her stuff. She came off as about as substantial as blancmange.
Without being able to hide behind the petticoats of The Australian or Twitter, she had no effect on the general back and forth.
C@tmomma @ #103 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:11 am
I get that you don’t get it. That’s fine. But what is disturbing is your propensity to being sucked in by such a blatant excuse for a power grab.
You might want to ask yourself exactly how a denial of service attack might imperil our forthcoming elections.
jenauthor @ #105 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:11 am
Trumble is generally the smartest male in any gathering of the GReedy Arseholes & Spivs Party. This is like being the tallest dwarf. This is also why the GRASPers fear and exclude women who don’t have Michaeliar-Cash-level reserves of hypocritical spite. Penny Wong still scares the shit out of them.
C@tmomma @ #118 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:25 am
But not all bad. 😉 In her condescending way all she did was promote Sally, and she does seem to understand Sally.
“tearing down the privileged and demanding they pay more tax”
“If the rules change and unions can grow…the wealth the poor create – now trickling up to the rich…”
The census wars were bad enough the first time around. Sheesh. Do they have to be waged again!
C@tmomma @ #114 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:22 am
*sigh*
a r,
I guess it gets down to semantics then.
Census: How the Government says the website meltdown unfolded
Updated 10 Aug 2016, 4:04pm
Australia’s census website was taken offline after four denial of service events, the minister in charge has said — but Michael McCormack stopped short of labelling the incidents “attacks”.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-10/census-night-how-the-shambles-unfolded/7712964
This article outlines the timeline of the attacks and the consequences.
Player One,
What I do get is that you are a smart arse. But we already knew that.
Fulvio Sammut@7:26am
Good one. Why Maley kept returning Albo “lost” wallet (which was is actually not lost) is beyond me. Any one has a theory on that.
Well, if semantics permit a minister to characterise 4 instances of Australians legitimately trying to complete the census and the census IT infrastructure being unable to cope with the (purely normal and legitimate) load as “denial of service events”, then yes. Semantics it would be.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/10/g7-in-disarray-after-trump-rejects-communique-and-attacks-weak-trudeau
The only solution is to go into a future without the USA
briefly
I think Cat and P1 are on the same page.
The debate comes about over ignorance on technology.
See politicians trying to have laws to eavesdrop on conversations with a warrant.
You can only do this if you break encryption at some point and the conversation is thus not secret.
Its either encrypted or its not.
This is an example of the ignorance of politicians. Its why Conroy was a great advocate for the NBN and Albo was not. No lack of trying on Albo’s part he just did not get the technology in the way Conroy did.
Its the same with the census. Denial of Service attacks are common. The incomptentnce of the contractor is precisely why we don’t need the laws to prevent denial of service attacked. You just need massive server farms to handle the traffic. No law is going to change that reality
Edit: The most likely candidate for DDOS attack is a government. North Korea doing Sony over the Interview movie as famous example.
briefly @ #122 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:31 am
No. I have no idea what C@tmomma is trying (unsuccessfully) to prove, but it occurs to me that it might be that the ALP intends to support this new power grab by the Department of Home Affairs and is trying to justify it somehow.
Poroti@11:20am
I am in a public place and I am LOL after seeing darth tuber photo and people are looking at me with quizzical face.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/paulette-jordan-first-native-american-governor-idaho-us-donald-trump-women-a8390451.html
In a democracy, there is always hope.
a r @ #127 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:36 am
So, what do you make of this?
The PM’s special cyber security advisor Alastair MacGibbon explains what happened next:
“The reason why the fourth incident was significant was because there are two failures. The first was a geo-blocking service fell over, and that’s one of the main defences used against denial of service.
“Once we lost the capability of preventing the geo-location of data coming in, then the router failed. As a result of that there was information inside the system that the ABS and IBM took very cautiously so not knowing what that information was, made a decision to take it off line.
Confessions@11:14am
What about the Photo in the article I posted @ 11:04am?
Angela Merkel was starring at Trump with furious face and expressions of others such as Bolten, Trump and Abe are priceless.
I’m simply trying to get to the bottom of what was a long-running saga here at the time.
I’m trying to do it without resorting to being a condescending smart arse.
C@tmomma @ #133 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:40 am
That like you, Alastair MacGibbon apparently knows bugger all about preventing denial of service attacks?
Anyone who has used a VPN to bypass a geoblock knows that geoblocking is completely ridiculous as a serious cyber security measure:
https://betanews.com/2017/01/25/should-geo-blocking-be-an-option-for-ddos-prevention/
C@tmomma @ #135 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:44 am
But why bring it up again? Have you been nursing this grudge for two years?
And also apparently without any new information or understanding.
Ven
You can blame rhwombat for causing it to be posted. 😆
C@tmomma@10:35am
What reprogramming of Wayne do you suggest? 🙂
With that article quoted above, it is really really hard to work out where the propaganda ends and the genuine delusion starts.
c@t
The “information inside the system’ that set off warnings was IBMs own data. Taking a router offline should not have caused a problem, except the redundant backup router had not been set up correctly.
@Player One
Considering the survey was only for a short term, the excuse that geo-protocal was going to be long term is nonsense.
Since it would be temporarily, a month or so.
rhwombat@10:39am
“Stuchbury jr”
🙂
Cat
On the census there were two problems. DDOS attacks and encryption. I still believe that encryption was poor and not a great example of protecting secrecy. The government was trying to be the Germans and their encryption left them vulnerable to a Britain being able to intercept the data.
With DDOS its like passing a law to stop North Korea not to call a certain phone number to stop faxes getting through. You can pass the law but its not going to stop the North Koreans attacks.
You can only change the phone number for the fax machine and hope it lasts long enough before more attacks come.
With computers at least server farms handling the traffic can blunt the effect of DDOS attacks by being able to handle that amount of traffic. That was the failure of the Census there. The laws being passed by parliament on foreign interference won’t stop this reality. They just make it easier to increase the cost of such an attack by a government.
The question is who pays the greater cost? Are we actually destroying democracy with draconian laws in an attempt to save it because of ignorance to how technology works? Not everyone is a tech head.
Ven:
This image is more appropriate!!
Confessions @ #145 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:58 am
Picture of the Week. !
Two laugh out louds in this household. (I’m glad I hadn’t started on my cup of tea.)
Why is it that right wingers, when you criticise them, whinge about you impeding on their free speech? It isn’t ‘the right to say whatever you want without other people calling you out for bullshit” — indeed, the second part of that phrase is essential for free speech to work.
Just for the record, that wonderful photo of the G6 + 1 appears to show Macron doing the actual talking in the pic, while Merkel is waiting for a break in the conversation to continue putting her ideas. Her lips are closed, Macron (partially hidden in that photo) has his mouth open, talking.
One reason why the Liberals are initially attracted to Christian church candidates is that they think they will bring along a lot of church members as rank and file party members to help with electioneering.
Also it it plays into their belief of the ‘silent majority’, the masses who are naturally conservative but don’t seem to be surveyed in opinion polls.
C@tmomma @ #133 Sunday, June 10th, 2018 – 11:40 am
I parse that as:
There was an ‘incident’. That’s fine, I don’t believe that anyone disputes this; so long as “incident” includes “high volumes of legitimate load made things break”.
They lost a node in their deployment, or a microservice running on a node shared with other services. For reasons not specifically stated.
Inaccurate at best. The Government perhaps needs a better cybersecurity adviser.
A router failed. Strictly after the geoblocking service failed, though nothing suggests the two things are related.
…this appears to be somewhere between gibberish and obfuscation. Of course there’s “information inside the system” and as it’s all being submitted by external sources of course nobody knows what it is.
The system was deliberately taken offline (and remained that way for close to 48 hours, if I remember it correctly).
But…none of that says there was a DDoS attack (or “event”). None of it provides evidence in support of the claim. Basically it says what we all know; the census IT systems failed under load and were eventually taken offline by ABS/IBM.
I have many problems with the Government’s story. I told their inquiry as much. But in a nutshell:
1. They allege four instances of a particular variant of DDoS attack (DNS reflection) that is neither novel nor difficult to detect, and generally characterize it as a “massive” event.
2. Public records do not show even one (small) DDoS attack occurring within Australia at the relevant time, let alone four massive ones.
3. Even if for some reason the public tracker missed the event(s), the sort of attack alleged would have left ample evidence on ABS systems (logged IP addresses indicating the DNS servers used, for instance).
4. That evidence could be used to confirm the attack with server operators, and perhaps even track down and identify the perpetrator(s), or at least their staging area, which would provide further evidence corroborating claims of an attack.
5. No such evidence has been provided by the Government, the ABS, or anyone else to corroborate their claims.
In the absence of any public evidence, and the further absence of any evidence furnished by the Government, I can only meet their claims of DDoS attacks with extreme skepticism.