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IBM's Reputation at Risk in Wake of Census Bungle

posted by janrinok on Saturday August 13 2016, @05:13AM   
from the quick,-point-a-finger dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for crutchy, although as we have already reported not everyone agrees what actually happened.

Three days after millions of Australians headed to bed frustrated and angry, having unsuccessfully tried to complete the census online, we still don't know exactly what went wrong, or who to blame. Politicians have chosen to blame the only non-government entity involved - US-based tech giant IBM, which won the $9.6 million contract in 2014 to design, develop and implement the online census.

There are a few different theories as to who is behind the disruption on census night. Fairfax David Wroe explains the possibilities.

"The denial of service attacks were completely predictable and should have been repelled readily. They weren't because of failures in the system that had been put in place for ABS by IBM, and as I said there are issues for both IBM and ABS about that," Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told radio station 2GB on Thursday. "There is no doubt that there were serious failures in the systems preparation for an entirely predictable denial of service attack."

Meanwhile Senator Nick Xenophon has said taxpayers should ask IBM for their money back.

Even Treasurer Scott Morrison has raised the possibility of legal action.

"If there are issues relating to the service provider in this case, then you could expect us to pursue that to the nth degree," Mr Morrison told ABC radio on Friday morning.

Last night an IBM spokeswoman finally came out publicly to say the Australian Signals Directorate [ASD] confirmed no data was compromised and it "regret[s] the inconvenience that has occurred".

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/business/ibms-reputation-at-risk-in-wake-of-census-bungle-20160812-gqqxpa.html

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Original Submission

• Re:harbinger of doom Re:harbinger of doom (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:56PM

  by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday August 13 2016, @12:56PM (#387473) Journal

  The ITRS 2015 report [semiconductors.org] admits that Moore's law won't really die:

  The combination of 3D device architecture and low power device will usher the (Third) Era of Scaling, identified in short as “3D Power Scaling”. Increase in the number of transistors per unit area will eventually be accomplished by stacking multiple layers of transistors

  [...] This vertical trend is led by Flash memories but it is expected that it will become an industry wide trend in the next decade. FinFET structures were built to control as much as possible the potential in the transistor channel. It was however anticipated by the ITRS in the 1998-2000 timeframe that eventually transistors would be fabricated with gates completely surrounding the semiconductor. Orienting the transistor substrate vertically and then completely surrounding it with a sequence of dielectric and metal layers deposited by means of deposition to fabricate the composite gate structure can more easily accomplished if the transistor is vertically oriented. It is clear that this method reduces the transistor footprint and in conjunction with creating multiple layers of transistors one on top of the other will accelerate the level of transistor density beyond Moore’s Law traditional trends.

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  [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]

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• Re:harbinger of doom (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 14 2016, @02:28AM

  by MostCynical (2589) on Sunday August 14 2016, @02:28AM (#387689) Journal

  Ok, so one out of the set. Someone may yet be fired for buying IBM...

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  "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

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