A bit of context for foreign readers. Every 5 years a mandatory national census is undertaken by Australia's premier data gathering agency, the Australian Burea

A bit of context for foreign readers. Every 5 years a mandatory national census is undertaken by Australia's premier data gathering agency, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). For over 100 years the census has been completed on paper forms delivered and collected by government employees. Political interference by prior governments who cut funding and left the department without a boss for 12 months. Change of leadership, no re-funding and the newly appointed ABS leader over promises savings while implementing a new online census without a backup plan. At the same time (this is the real story) decides to collect names and addresses of every person completing the census to link these previously anonymous data gathering. New code, untested systems and an expected audience of 15 million people logging on, most likely after dinner around 1930 EST. The system experiences load, the site admins panic, make mistakes then pull the server off-line. At the same time politicians and other stake holders deride ordinary Austrians who question the name-gathering issue. As the service goes off-line and people try to enter the census, the site is down, the PM reports on twitter everything is good just before 1930. The ABS continues to auto-tweet the service is working. Australian gold medal swimmer at the Olympics derides convicted Chinese swimmer of drug use. Australian politicians blame Chinese for hacking. [0] 72 hours later the service was still down. The census requires around 95% completion to be useful. 10M AUD is spent and we have around a 50% completion. The Australian security services investigated the alleged hack and found the administration and contractor (IBM) to be at most fault. An all round cluster-f*ck. I saw this claim yesterday (https://twitter.com/peterrenshaw/status/764991292828815360 https://twitter.com/peterrenshaw/status/764991292828815360) and had a quick chat to Austin (SWE) and Adam (Organiser/AI & Neural networks) asking for them to write a summary of what they did addressing both non-technical for the benefit of very non-technical press and political wonks as well as a technical article that explains the assumptions made and addressing how the ABS may have technical reasons for not using third-party computing services. As far as I can tell this article is the general non-technical article by Adam. [0] check my twitter feed for examples of articles explaining the buildup: https://twitter.com/peterrenshaw https://twitter.com/peterrenshaw