Australian Population Census Computer System Problems

I had a call from ABC Radio this morning about the ABS announcing they had suffered denial of service attacks from overseas.  Perhaps the ABS staff need to go down to the foyer of their building and break the glass on the display case, with the punch card machine in it. I used a machine like that thirty years ago to write programs for the Census and it worked fine. ;-)

But seriously,  keep in mind this is not a safety critical system: no lives are endangered. People can fill it in tomorrow, or the day after, or get a paper form. But the minister needs to be asked if sufficient resources were given to the ABS and were they allowed to use their preferred method of data collection, which would be surveys, not a census.

At 9:50pm Census night I tried the ABS site at 10pm and still got:

"Thank you for participating in the Census. The system is very busy at the moment. Please wait for 15 minutes before trying again. Your patience and cooperation are appreciated. [code 9]"

The Census error message web page is 117 Kbytes, with 49 Kbytes of Javascript and 52 Kbytes of CSS, which seems a bit much just to display a few hundred characters of error message. But presumably this code is cached and reused throughout (in which case, it is not too large). The CSS uses Pure v0.5.0 . 

ps: My comments on the 2006 eCensus.

GovHack Canberra Results

Greetings from the last day of GovHack 2015 at the Australian National University in Canberra. Entries closed a few minutes ago and some of the tams are showing off the applications they built to use open access government data. Patentstori.es showed their system to "Explore the history of Australian innovation" using data from the patent office. Disastermaster.me "... maps the location of all disasters related to Australians since the early 1800's". AuStat generates quiz questions about Australia.

Mathew Purcell, noted computer educator, and his class of Computing and Code Cadets from Canberra Grammar School, recreated the whole of Canberra in the Minecraft game using geospatial data. They also produced Explore CBR to map the locations of public facilities in Canberra.

Crashstory.com is a "platform to research and annotate road accidents, developing them into narratives for the purposes of reflection and providing increased awareness of road safety".

There is a list of all the project from GovHack 2015 available.

Australian Parliamentary Email System Hacked?

Yesterday I was interviewed by ABC Radio about alledged hacking of the Australian Parliamentary Email System, the result is "China rejects Australian hacking allegations" (ABC Radio Australia, 1 May 2014, 14:05 AEST). This seems a reasonably balanced update on an old story that email on the  Australian Parliament’s unclassified system was being monitored by China. I pointed out there was no way to know who was doing the monitoring, this should be investigated,  but it is was not a major security issue. The problem with security in parliament house is that while public servants are trained in security measures, this is less the case for the MPs and their political staff.

ps: It was amusing to be described as a  "cyber warfare specialist" at the Australian National University. I actually teach IT ethics and sustainability at ANU. I did work for the Defence Department, but mostly on essentially administrative IT policy.

Random Hacks of Kindness Sydney Judging

Greetings from  Random Hacks of Kindness Global Hackathon in Sydney. Three teams having been working on community computer applications (RHoK Sydney problems) for the last two days. Myself and two other judges will be looking at the team presentations shortly, then scoring using the standard RHoK Judging Criteria: 

1. creativity / innovative / unique
2. utility, can it be used in the field?
3. applicable, does it solve a problem
4. impact, local or global
5. progress (on existing work, or starting from nothing)
6. usability

The first team is developing a system to help with donations for the Bagong Barrio Education Fund. (BBEF). The Bagong Barrio Education Fund is a not-for-profit program for education of children in the village of Bagong Barrio, Manila, in the Philippines.

The second team was Zspaces  who aim to match up people who have empty office, retail or warehouse space with those having a short term need. This is conceptually similar to Renew Newcastle, which makes use of vacant shop-fronts for artists to sell their works.  An example of a use of space in Sydney is the Leichhardt Pop In Space. But Zspaces would allow for much more short term use of just a few days. This could be popular with councils who don't like to see empty shops in their streets.

The third team is adding extra features to Open Development Cambodia (ODC), to help about Cambodia's economic and social development. They interface to a MySQL database, to extract and visualize data about Cambodia.

The range of applications and approaches were very interesting.

Humanitarian Computing Completion in Sydney

Greetings from  Random Hacks of Kindness Global Hackathon at the offices of Ninefold in Sydney. This is an application development competition, where teams hear about a problem effecting a community group and then develop an application to help. At the moment Inês Almeida is giving a presentation on her work presenting a positive image for girls via social media. I have volunteered to be one of the judges for RHoK, given my past work on free open source disaster management.

Inês suggested that the typical startup process used with for-profit ventures does not suit social enterprises. Small ventures could use crowd funding, but need to keep coming up with new attention getting ("disruptive") ideas. But she cautioned about using some of the less ethical tactics of commercial ventures.

It is a cool sunny day and Ninefold's office has a panoramic view of Darling Harbor and the Blue Mountains.

Cyber War Will Take Place

Thomas Rid's book "Cyber War Will Not Take Place" (Oxford University Press, 2013), is readable and well researched. It argues that on-line attacks on nation states will be at most an adjunct to the use of conventional military force. The limits to the effectiveness of an on-line attack are discussed, using documented cases. The conclusion is that cyber-war will not happen, because it is unreliable in its effect, cannot be well targeted and can't cause violence directly. Surprisingly, Queensland, Australia, features prominently as one place where a cyber-attack on infrastructure had a significant effect. In 2000 the Maroochy Shire SCADA system was commanded to dump millions of liters of raw sewage into waterways.

Rid soberly counters the hype around "cyber-war", but perhaps goes too far in dismissing it altogether. There are many weapons which have uncertain military value, but are nonetheless made ready for use. An example is Barnes Wallis' bouncing bomb, used to breech the Möhne and Edersee Dams in WW2. The bomb had a mostly indirect effect, by breeching the dam wall, cutting off hydroelectric power and flooding the land below. The bombs has some propaganda value, but were of limited military value.

It is unlikely there will be a pure cyberwar, but very likely that any future major conventional war will involve extensive use of on-line attacks. These will be intended to cause confusion and degrade the enemy infrastructure to make conventional kinetic attack more effective, rather than replace it.

Compared to conventional warfare, cyber-war takes little hardware. Office computers are cheap compared to missiles, submarines and supersonic aircraft. A country with a conscription army also has a ready supply of recruits, who can be screened for computing skills. Reserve personnel, who work in the ICT, can be used, with most of their technical training taken care of by their civilian employers (previously I proposed such a "Australian CyberWarfare Battalion").

Nations with less developed infrastructure may also see this as a useful form of asymmetric warfare. A less developed nation has little to fear in terms of retaliation when  disrupting the water, transport and power infrastructure of a developed nation.

Doctor Who Finds Hacker HQ Using My HP Laptop

The episode of TV series "Doctor Who" broadcast in Australia last night featured a HP Pavilion DM1-4000 series laptop. The plot of "The Bells of Saint John" centers around WiFi being used to hack into home computers and then download the mind of the computer user (the latter is fanciful, but the former a real risk).

he Doctor's companion Clara, uses the laptop to locate where the WiFi hack was being coordinated from, by using information the staff have posted to social media. While the speed with which this was done is hard to believe, the technique itself is real. US computer security company Mandiant released a report in February, where they located a building in Shanghai from which the PLA's Cyberwarfare Unit 61398 was alleged to conduct hacking attacks.

It will be interesting to see if any political theorists conduct an analysis of the TV show. During the cold war US depictions of invading aliens were seen as a metaphor for the communist threat. This fictional depiction of aliens attacking western minds could be seen as a warning.

The HP Pavilion dm1-4000 Series is a low cost 11.6 inch screen laptop. I have found it useful to carry around. Like my unit, the one used on Doctor Who appears to have had the stickers removed and the shiny bezel around the screen painted mat black.
 

Gadget Maker's Shed in Canberra

Recently I attended the monthly show and tell at Make Hack Void. This is a non profit Canberra based group which make gadgets, out of old bits and pieces. If you have seen the TV show "Mythbusters", then you get the idea. The group has a "shed" at Downer to work in and a set of tools (plus strict safety rules).

On display during my visit was a talking household interface, a laser cut case for a tiny computer and a robot aircraft for finding people lost in the outback.

The shed looks like a backyard inventor's dream, with neatly arranged steel shelves full of cataloged bits and pieces for making gadgets. There are electronics assembly areas, machinery areas, a 3D printer, computer controlled lathe and other equipment. Mostly importantly there is a kettle, bar fridge and a large table for discussions and getting advice from others.

Such "mens sheds" have been promoted in Australia for keeping older people active, but the MakeHackVoid welcomes any age or gender. In the USA, the Defense Department is promoting such "Do It With Others" (DIWO) activities in schools, as a way to encourage a technologically trained workforce. This has been popularized though Make magazine from O'Reilly Media Media.

Guardian Shorts eBook Series

The UK's Guardian Newspaper is conducting an interesting experiment in on-line publishing with its Guardian Shorts. These are a series of eBooks, sold via the Amazon Kindle and Apple iTunes stores. These have commentary on current events, and are up to 30,000 words each, costing less than £4. The first is "Phone Hacking: How the Guardian broke the story", 5 August 2011.

Newspapers repackaging material for educational purposes is not new, but doing this as an eBook may provide a whole new market. However, it remains to be seen if the content is any better than that free on-line. As an example the Wikipedia's "News International phone hacking scandal", is 14,000 carefully written, researched, referenced and most likely less biased, words, for free.

Make Hack Void in Canberra

Greetings from BarCamp Canberra 2011 in in Canberra, where we just had a presentation on Make Hack Void. This is a non profitCanberra based group which does hacking in the more traditional sese of the word. That is they make gadgets, mostly computer controlled, out of old bits and pieces. The group has a shed at Downer to work in and a set of tools (plus strict safety rules):

Our space (Map) is a community workshop in Downer where members can come to work on their projects, get access to tools and expertise, and meet like-minded people. We have membership options including associate & student membership rates, and casual membership rates.

We also hold Maker Meetups on the 1st & 3rd Tuesdays of each month where anyone at all can chat, show and tell, get help or advice, and talk about their projects. You don't have to be a member to come to a Meetup.

Our group includes people with extremely diverse interests. Fibreglass moulds to FPGA electronics, Arduinos to DIY pizza ovens. Plus lots more. We're all interested in making things, hacking on projects, and we're not afraid of voiding warranties if we have to.

If you can't make it to the next meeting then subscribe to the Makers mailing list, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or join us in the IRC channel.