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FWIW, after reading some other articles on the riots (easy to Google for), it's not clear to me the situation is as cut and dry as The Register article is makin

FWIW, after reading some other articles on the riots (easy to Google for), it's not clear to me the situation is as cut and dry as The Register article is making it out to be. That is, while the government is definitely blaming the initial docking of pay on "a technical glitch", the security services are basically saying this was a deliberate docking of pay. I have no idea what really happened, but I do think that calling this a mere "technical glitch" seems pretty unlikely. The paychecks went out all over the entire country, and in many cases people's paychecks were half what they expected. I have to think somebody would have noticed before all the paychecks went out of it was just a case of "Whoops, the tax rate automatically reverted." To be clear, I definitely think it's possible it actually was a clerical error, but it's definitely premature to take the government's explanation at face value.

richbell 3y ago
You'd think such obvious payroll issues would be caught, yet there's stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  The issues with the Phoenix payroll system basically prove my point. First, that wasn't a "technical glitch", nor was it really even just a "software problem" - it was a complex project management failure on many levels. But, as your Wikipedia link points out, the problems and failure of the system were well known before the first Phoenix paycheck went out. I'm sure there were tons of government employees who thought "this is totally fucked" well before they went live. So for the PNG government to say "woops, we just sent out everyone's bad paycheck and nobody noticed until we started getting strikes/riots" (and mind you, the technical problem here really was just a "change that single value in that box" problem) strikes me as unlikely.
  - richbell 3y ago
    Yeah. The issue wasn't that nobody knew it was broken, it's that they knew it was broken and rolled it out anyway.

richbell 3y ago

You'd think such obvious payroll issues would be caught, yet there's stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
The issues with the Phoenix payroll system basically prove my point. First, that wasn't a "technical glitch", nor was it really even just a "software problem" - it was a complex project management failure on many levels. But, as your Wikipedia link points out, the problems and failure of the system were well known before the first Phoenix paycheck went out. I'm sure there were tons of government employees who thought "this is totally fucked" well before they went live. So for the PNG government to say "woops, we just sent out everyone's bad paycheck and nobody noticed until we started getting strikes/riots" (and mind you, the technical problem here really was just a "change that single value in that box" problem) strikes me as unlikely.
- richbell 3y ago
  Yeah. The issue wasn't that nobody knew it was broken, it's that they knew it was broken and rolled it out anyway.