Who Can You Believe?
Posted On: 2016-08-11
I have to admit that I was brought up to believe that our elected representatives ... members of Parliament ... members of Congress ... Senators ... could be trusted to tell the truth. Of course I discarded that naïve belief long ago but I still manage to be gob-smacked when I see it being flouted so blatantly ... as it is here in Australia right now.
You may have heard that we here in Australia had ... or tried to have ... our first online Census the other night. It was a fiasco!
Many people, us included, didn't receive our unique access codes to log on to the official website and complete the required details but, even if we did, the website either crashed, was hacked, was attacked or was on the receiving end of a DDOS attack.
The first announcement that was made to explain why the site disappeared early in the evening (and 2 days later it is still not back online) was that someone tried to hack the site and it was shut down to keep everyone's personal details secure.
Oh but wait, then they realised that if they had to shut the website down to protect everyone's information then it couldn't have been as secure as they were proclaiming it to be in the weeks leading up to Census night. The CIA, the Pentagon and others might have been hacked in days gone by but our Bureau of Statistics website was so secure no one would be able to break in.
So a couple of hours later they changed to the story and the problem became a number of DDOS attacks from overseas. That was a pretty safe explanation wasn't it? I mean how many ordinary people know what a DDOS attack really is?
Oh but wait, they just used the word 'attack' and that wasn't going to instil confidence in anyone was it so they changed the story once again. The 'attack' wasn't an attack at all ... it was just a ... "thing".
The DDOS "thing" sounded like a good excuse until someone who knew a bit more about the Internet than the politicians and their advisors pointed out that there are websites out there that monitor DDOS attacks and they recorded nothing hitting Australia on Tuesday afternoon or evening.
So how do the politicians respond to that? They're going to have an enquiry "that will get to the bottom of this" and probably won't come back with an answer till the issue is so far out of the news cycle that no one remembers it.
So what was the real cause of the problem? What was so embarrassing that they couldn't tell us the truth?
Well the politicians and the public servants all assured us that the servers and systems they had in place would be able to cope with an estimated 16 million people all lodging their information over a period of just 4 to 5 hours. They had hired IBM and spent $10 million to make sure it would all work.
They even told us how many individual submissions the system could cope with every minute ... and there was the cause of the problem straight from their own mouths.
When you did the maths and multiplied the number the system could cope with each minute by the number of minutes in 4 or 5 hours you end up with a figure that shows that the system was always going to fail because it could really only cope with about 65 percent of those 16 million people who would be logging on.
Today's newspapers here in Australia are telling us that we're now the laughing stock of big data providers around the world. Not only can't we organize something as important as a national census but we think we can lie our way out when we make very obvious mistakes.
I guess the moral of that story is something that my mother always told me ... never tell lies because the truth will always find you out.
Sometimes I despair for the future of the human race when we build so much of our world on a foundation of lies. Imagine what life could really be like if we were people of our word?
These days it's hard to trust anyone and everyone points the finger at the adult industry, both online and offline, as being among the worst offenders when it comes to telling lies. However, back when I was working in the adult industry in the real world, some of the toughest operators were the people you could trust because they were people of their word.
I don't know what that lack of honesty in people we should be able to trust does for you but it makes me want to get back to doing my own thing, building my own little empire, and being true to my own values ... which seem to be much higher than the values held by most politicians.
So it's back to work for me and I hope that it's back to work for you and don't believe anything anyone says unless you have verified the information yourself. It's a sad approach to life but one that is becoming more and more necessary.