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> I love the BoM. You have no reason to. They're not a well-run, efficient organisation, even by government department standards. > over http:// http:// urls

> I love the BoM. You have no reason to. They're not a well-run, efficient organisation, even by government department standards. > over http:// http:// urls because of the overhang of farm equipment which can't handle TLS https: connections. This is the public narrative, and is a brazen lie. THERE IS NO SUCH FARMING EQUIPMENT! Certainly not in 2025. Their site DOES HAVE a certificate, and supports HTTPS, right now. They just refuse to let you use it, redirecting a successful HTTPS connection back to HTTP. If there was farming equipment (Which models? Vendors? Affecting how many farmers?) out there they would be broken right now because port 443 is open and listening. If they can connect to port 443, then they don't need to be redirected back to port 80 because they worked. If they can only connect to port 80, then the presence of port 443 makes no difference. I keep pointing this out, and "true blue aussies that looooove the BoM" keep arguing about this. The BoM spends hundreds of millions on IT, tens of millions on consultancies like Accenture, but they can't manage a $50 certificate and a bog standard HTTP/HTTPS endpoint. My iPhone, right now, can't connect to most BoM web pages because of this stupid, stupid issue! There is no mystical broken farming equipment, but there definitely are inconvenienced users like me! After putting up this rant for years and years in various forums, a former BoM employee finally fessed up -- they were the one that tried switching HTTP to HTTPS years ago and "broke" their internal systems. Not non-existent farming equipment, it was BoM's own internal services that fell over. Why? Because they hadn't updated any of it in decades, and the software was so old that it couldn't handle "modern" cipher suites and TLS versions. Modern being "newer than SSL 3.0"... in 2015. That's not the sign of a competently run organisation worthy of admiration.

RachelF 1y ago
Farmers have a reason to be sceptical: The BoM caused hundreds of millions of $ of damage to livestock farming - they warned about a huge drought in 2022 causing massive livestock culling. Instead there were years of above-average rainfall.
- ggm 1y ago
  The BoM cop this both ways. People don't look to the candlestick error bars on their statements, and their long range weather forecast is outside the window of the ABC article we're discussing. I get how upsetting it is to de-stock but if their best belief is the risk is high, what else are they meant to do? If they hadn't said this, and there'd been the drought, they would have got your scorn too, right? If you know a climate/weather bureau of comparable scale of footprint doing a better job, we'd all like to know. AFAIK there isn't one: most of the alternates work in different scale, with different climate forcing functions.

RachelF 1y ago

Farmers have a reason to be sceptical: The BoM caused hundreds of millions of $ of damage to livestock farming - they warned about a huge drought in 2022 causing massive livestock culling. Instead there were years of above-average rainfall.

ggm 1y ago
The BoM cop this both ways. People don't look to the candlestick error bars on their statements, and their long range weather forecast is outside the window of the ABC article we're discussing. I get how upsetting it is to de-stock but if their best belief is the risk is high, what else are they meant to do? If they hadn't said this, and there'd been the drought, they would have got your scorn too, right? If you know a climate/weather bureau of comparable scale of footprint doing a better job, we'd all like to know. AFAIK there isn't one: most of the alternates work in different scale, with different climate forcing functions.