Census website

When I first heard the 2016 census would be completed online by the majority of Australians, it was just after lining up at the local school to vote in the Federal Election with pencil and paper.  I thought that if the government has the I.T. infrastructure to securely survey the entire nation, with the scalability to allow each one of us to log-in at once, they why can’t we vote online?

Census Offline!

It looks like we have the answer to why we can’t vote online.  Apparently the government’s I.T. infrastructure isn’t up to the census task after all.  Social media is buzzing with reports of the census website crashing mid survey, or being off-line completely. Surely the boffins would have anticipated over half of the country trying to log-in at once?

Security

As for security, a lot of people are questioning the safety of divulging personal information to the government.  I think it’s too late to worry about that, the government already know everything about us through the Tax Office, Medicare, Centrelink, VicRoads, etc, etc.  Many people put too much private information on social media, I’d be more concerned about the security of Facebook’s servers than the governments.