Disaster Strikes Norwegian Government Web Portal 176
An anonymous reader writes "Altinn.no is a web service run by the Norwegian government, on which citizens can find, fill out and deliver forms electronically. Every year Norwegian citizens can also log in to check their tax results. This year, as every year, the site was unable to cope with the traffic generated from everyone wanting to check their taxes at the same time. New this year, however, was that once people were finally able to log in, a significant amount of people were logged in as someone else. Users then had access to all financial data of this unfortunate person over two years back in time, in addition to the financial information of his wife and the company he worked for. Altinn shut down some 15 minutes later, and has been down since."
Remember how they file their taxes (Score:4, Informative)
by the government sending them a letter saying how much is owed.
The government does all the calculations.
Re:Remember how they file their taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is good, right? For 90% of citizens, govt calculation is good enough. The only reason it is not being implemented in the US is because of the lobbying of Tax processing services.
Re:Remember how they file their taxes (Score:5, Informative)
The Norwegian government had to recalculate my taxes and my wife's taxes no less than three times. They have the power to deposit money and withdraw it from my bank account. I tried to work out their calculations, but not being a native Norwegian speaker, I struggled to understand how they were doing things. I just have to trust that things are correct.
The Norwegian government always seems to do what they say they will, they just do it in their own time and usually with six or eight tries to do it right...
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They have the power to deposit money and withdraw it from my bank account.
Is that a statutory power, or did you voluntarily give it? What if they calculate that you owe more than what is in your account?
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Well, anyone has the power to deposit money in your account, and I guess most people don't have a problem with that. On the other hand, the Norwegian government does not have the power to take money from your account. They give you a bill like any other business.
Funny, I am no native Norwegian speaker
Future possibilities by automated taxes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Remember how they file their taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
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It didn't happen this year, but the previous two years I'd made errors which the IRS corrected, and both times I got back about $1000 more than I had expected.
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Re:Remember how they file their taxes (Score:5, Informative)
That's not entirely true. What happens is this:
The government sends you a form for filing taxes, the form is pre-filled with those values that have already been reported by other entities, but next to every one of these values there is a field for correcting the value if it is somehow wrong. (this happens if, for example, you've got private debts, or if your employer makes a mistake in reporting)
You thus get a pre-filled form, but you should nevertheless check that the values on the form look correct before filing it.
And yes, the form also contains calculations on taxes, thus it says: "assuming we got it correct, here's what your tax will be", but that part, offcourse, will change if you add or change anything on the form.
Learn from the Experts, ye tax-boggled folks! (Score:5, Interesting)
It is done similarly in über-effective, ultra-efficient Singapore:
1) Let's say I'm employed by company C. Company C will send to taxman my identity card number and the amount they have paid me for the tax year.
2) Taxman will do the calculation of tax. Taxman will also consider the recurring tax claims/rebates I am likely to have (spouse/parents-related rebates, for example).
4) Taxman sends me a reminder to confirm their calculations on their website.
5) I will adjust the calculations if needed and submit the final figure.
6) Taxman sends me the final amount of tax I need to pay with payment options including a 12-month instalment plan deducted from my bank account.
7) If I'm audited, I will have to provide documents for the claims/rebates.
Total time spent: about 1 hour (including claims for private insurance, education expenses, donations)
Total $$$ spent: ZERO, ZILCH, NADA!
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I am surprisingly ignorant of the tax codes of the world. I thought things like the UK's VAT were way, way more common than filling out tax forms (albeit in a much easier manner than is the nightmare of the United States). Why don't more places use some sort of flat tax?
Re:Learn from the Experts, ye tax-boggled folks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because most places know that a flat tax is horribly regressive. Anyway, it isn't the stepped rates that make the tax code complicated, it is all the loopholes, exceptions and deductions.
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But couldn't that regression be fixed by a simple "If you make less than X, you don't pay" kind of thing?
I still think it'd be massively easier to have it all collected automatically.
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The transition has to be smooth. Otherwise people are stuck in poverty. If they get a better job they suddenly make less "actual income" despite being paid more. It's already an issue with various government programs in the US where if you decide to, gasp, save money so you don't live paycheck to paycheck you lose your benefits.
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I was on food stamps for a time (and might end up back on them...). If you had more than $2,000 in the bank you were ineligible (NJ). =|
Re:Learn from the Experts, ye tax-boggled folks! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the terms "progressive" and "regressive" when applied to taxes have been hijacked from their mathematical roots for political purposes. A flat tax is by definition not regressive, it's flat. A regressive tax is one whose effective tax rate decreases with increasing income. A progressive tax is one whose tax rate increases with increasing income.
A flat tax does neither. It is flat. It is the same effective tax rate regardless of income.
Where people get the idea that it is regressive is by pointing out that a certain fixed minimum amount of money needs to be spent on essentials (food, clothing, shelter). Poor people have to spend a greater percentage of their income on these essentials. Which means they have a smaller percentage of their income available for discretionary (optional) purchases. A flat tax takes the same percentage bite out of income, which turns into a larger proportional bite out of the discretionary income of poor people. e.g. Say $10k is the minimum needed for essentials, and the flat tax is 10%. A poor person making $15k has $5k discretionary income but pays $2k in taxes. That's 40% of his discretionary income. A rich person making $100k has $90k discretionary income but pays $10k in taxes. That's 11% of his discretionary income.
However, this has nothing to do with a flat tax. It is easily corrected by excluding from taxation the minimum amount which needs to be spent on essentials. Something like the standard deduction which the U.S. uses. Once you do that, the flat tax is then a tax only on discretionary spending, and is the same rate regardless of income. It is not regressive. e.g. After a $10k standard deduction, the poor person pays 10% tax on $5k. The rich person pays 10% tax on $90k. Both are paying 10% on their discretionary income. It is flat.
(I actually prefer a progressive tax, but hate it when people call a flat tax regressive. It's not if you implement the simple work-around of a standard deduction.)
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I am surprisingly ignorant of the tax codes of the world. I thought things like the UK's VAT were way, way more common than filling out tax forms (albeit in a much easier manner than is the nightmare of the United States). Why don't more places use some sort of flat tax?
You make it sound like VAT is the only tax we have to pay in the UK. This isn't true - we pay tax on income, capital gains, etc and there are all sorts of tax credits you can get based on your personal circumstances (the tax and benefits system sometimes seems so complex to me that I wonder if career benefits scroungers have to go to university to do a degree in scrounging!).
Anyway, for most people, there is no requirement to fill in a tax return - your bank automatically deducts tax from any interest they
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I thought things like the UK's VAT were way, way more common than filling out tax forms (albeit in a much easier manner than is the nightmare of the United States).
Ah no, we've cunningly combined the worst of all systems.
- We have VAT (regressive, and CHARGED ON ESSENTIALS for far too much of the time.) Yesterday's annual announcement "rationalises" this by charging it on even MORE food items.
- We have Income Tax which is then largely credited back to low earners in an incredibly complicated and time-consuming way, rather than just taking them out of the system initially.
- We have National Insurance which is a regressive flat tax in everything but name. If you overpay
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Wait, I forgot the part where you personally are taxed on what your landlord's property was worth in 1993.
Re:Learn from the Experts, ye tax-boggled folks! (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I can't comment on Norway from personal experience, I've had to complete tax forms in Finland, the UK and the USA.
The Finnish ones were genuinely trivial: check option A or option B, sign it, date it and send it back: done. The tax office there knew exactly what was going on, the money was transferred electronically and the only other piece of correspondence I received was a confirmation slip.
The British one was oh, a couple of sheets of A4 or so. Annoying, but manageable. The tax office there had actually issued it despite my not actually needing to file a manual return at all, so I had to fill it in with mostly zeroes and send it back. They initially seemed confused, and then just went quiet after a couple of clarifying conversations with people at the local office.
The USA one was about 6 or 7 forms (I never did work out how many in the end), all with accompanying small-print documentation which in turn contained references to additional supporting documentation that contained "calculation tables" to supposedly help me understand the supporting documentation, so that I could then go back and fill in the tax form itself, and all its add-on appendices. I was told that I had the option of supplying a shoe-box full of receipts that I should have been religiously collecting for the previous year, or I could just take some standard number. I was also told that if I filled the forms in by following the incorrect advice of an official of the tax office, I was still liable for any additional fines arising. I have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, so I'm not unfamiliar with mathematics and logic, and even I just went ahead and hired an accountant.
The USA's taxation scheme is far and away the most complex bureaucratic structure I have ever encountered. The 19th Century British Empire's mightiest bureaucrats would have wept in joy at its sheer scale and complexity. Kafkaesque doesn't begin to describe it.
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The UK government forces employers to do the calculations for all employees and for VAT. You'd think this would be ultra-efficient for the Revenue services as there's therefore nothing left to do but spot cock-ups and conspiracies, and yet it is still THE worst organisation in public or private life in the UK.
Re:Remember how they file their taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically the same here in Finland. You get a pre-filled tax form in the mail. "Doing my taxes" every year takes no more than 5-10 minutes; checking the values are correct on the form, logging into the tax authority website, making corrections if needed (never needed to), adding deductions as needed, and then submitting it electronically. I even know when I will get my refund way ahead of time. The refund goes straight into my bank account automatically, I don't need to do anything. It's all very easy and simple to understand, even for a layperson without a finance degree.
I don't need a paper record, it's all on file electronically. I only need receipts if I have significant, large deductions.
It is FAR better than the system in the US, where a complete racket has been built up in the form of "tax services", and making the tax laws so complicated and full of loopholes that the average EDUCATED person cannot figure it out in 10 minutes or less. There is a serious problem when you need professional tax services or an accountant to do your personal taxes. I say this as an American living abroad for the past 12 years, so I have much experience with both systems.
Back to the OP, wow... it looks like the tax authority really screwed this up. However, that doesn't change my view that it's still the best way to handle taxes. Mistakes can and do happen in any system. Luckily the issue was discovered rather quickly and they made the correct decision and took the system offline.
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That would seem to pose the same basic problem that taxes in the US/Canada have (where we file our own). Self employment income, some small business income, and income from things like garage sales would still need to be reported, and would basically junk all of the calculations they already did.
So right now I'm in canada, and a grad student. We file our own taxes, but the government gets copies of all of our income statements from actual companies. So what do I have:
Employment: Income as a Teaching assi
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Here in Bellgium, paper tax forms don't come pre-filled, but if you opt to enter your taxes electronically, most things are pre-filled and you also get an estimate based on the final values you've entered.
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The government does all the calculations.
Same thing happens here. Your tax return is something you deal with while waiting for your tea to brew.
(I've also had to fill out a 1040. I was absolutely stunned at how complex such a (theoretically) simple thing can be made (the guide to filling your return, if formatted in standard octavo size, would literally be an entire book). I'd hate to imagine how much it costs the US economy each year for the entire country to fight their way through one of these monstrosities).
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Most of the country doesn't need to bother with the 1040. The much simpler 1040A covers most situations nicely. And can be done in ten mi
Staggered ticket system (Score:3)
Really they need a staggered ticket system to distribute the load over time. Issue each citizen a ticket that indicates a period when they can log in to check data, both a soonest and latest date (stragglers not tolerated). This is no different than physical scenarios where people are grouped by first letter of last name, etc. in a crowded office and then each group served sequentially to lighten the load.
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Scalability - Government style (Score:2)
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They have a population of less than 5 million, so limiting to 300000 concurrent logins (6% of the total population) doesn't sound too crazy. Worst case, everyone wakes up on tax morning and goes to check online, and not everybody gets in until the end of the day.
They probably had a fixed budget, with limited hardware, and/or didn't have the time to make it scalable.
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Nevermind, it sounds like they've spent $200 million on this system since its inception and the site goes down due to traffic every year... that's some extreme incompetence at work.
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Since this is taxpayer money, it does indeed make sense to spread the load over time, which is free, rather than spread it across capacity, which is not.
I hope Kenneth collects on this (Score:2)
Re:I hope Kenneth collects on this (Score:4, Informative)
I foresee a large lawsuit settlement in his future
This isn't the USA
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I'll take your word, but do you happen to have some articles to back this up?
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Well torts, or civil wrongs, as we know them are a common law concept (relying on precedent). Most of continental Europe does not use common law; rather they have a codified system. Norway may or may not have legislated an law under which this person could claim, I don't know, but it wouldn't really fall under tort law either way.
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Some key points (Score:5, Informative)
* The government has spent on the order of $200 millions on this system
* Accenture is the main developer
* Every year the systems go down because it doesn't scale
* This year a queueing system was put in place to "fix" scalability
* From an outsider's view at least, it would seem like some cowboy decided to put up a Varnish-type frontend cache as a desperate measure to handle traffic with no thought given to sessions
* An independent report basically slaughtered most of the systems with criticism of flaws last year, which was kept secret until a week ago
* Also yesterday someone found several flaws which allowed any website to grab a json(?) script and steal userinfo if the browser had a valid session
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Hopefully, they have not done so, yet.
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That doesn't necessarily mean final acceptance and payment tendered. Maybe that is the case. But in many contracts like this, there's a live test phase clause, too.
Re:Some key points (Score:5, Interesting)
That's anyones guess, but if it goes like everywhere else, the guys that were contracted for this work wore the nicest suits and made their clients feel visionary. The guys that knew their IT kept behaving improperly and had suits that didn't really fit them well. Also, they talked all the time of risks and danger. So it was a no-brainer, quite literally.
Re:Some key points (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually a huge system, with many govt departments using it daily, and most of the time it works well. It's just that each year, when the rest of Norway also tries to log in, things go kaboom (That has happened several years in a row, I might add). The name, Altinn can be translated to all-in - it's basically THE portal between govt and citizens on many points. For example accountants use it daily (and every year they complain that they can't do anything at all for several days when this happens)
So, most of the time it works (and works well, some might say), but a few days every year it's massively underscaled. This year, they apparently tried some half-baked emergency caching, which failed spectacularly.
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Summary: overly pricey poorly developed unreliable unscalable stupidly managed bloat.
This could have been done for less than $5 million.
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* Accenture is the main developer
Found your problem. Right there.
Amen (Score:2)
Bunch of useless egotistical idiots the lot of them. The know-nothings they hire seem to think they're gods gift because they work for this piss poor company , but most of them are clueless. Many a time I've had to sort out the mess they've created.
Re:Some key points (Score:5, Interesting)
They should have called up their Danish brothers in arms - we had the exact same failure here some years ago. Skat.dk kept going down, so they added loadbalancers but the way they assigned keys ended up with collisions and gave users access to other peoples data.
I'm intrigued (Score:2)
How, from a technical POV can this even happen? Dirty cache? Corrupted pointers?
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All the URLs look alike because the login ID is in cookies, and the cache wasn't set to figure in the cookie state.
Cautionary tale about digital cash (Score:4, Insightful)
When everybody's money is 'stored' in a government computer somewhere saying how much money you have, imagine what happens when there's a glitch putting your money in someone else's account.
Yeah, I know, bank accounts.
But, glitches happen there, too. At least you have a little cash to get to and from the bank to pursue the matter. When it's digital all the way down, what will you do?
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This already happens once in a while with banks. Basically all transfers by accident gets sent to the same account. So after a few hours, that person is quite rich.
Of course, they have routines for catching this, because they know it will happen, so when they catch it after a few hours, and correct it.
Example: Norwegian man was Norways richest man for about 1 hour. [dagbladet.no], Google translated version [google.no]
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It's a moot point anyway, as in either situation my first recourse would be to phone the bank, not visit it.
Not just the login error (Score:4, Interesting)
I normally wouldn't care about this, but since the Norwegian government (i.e. the people, myself included) paid 1 billion NOK for this solution, I expect it to WORK. Mind you, this is not the first time we've had problems with Altinn, this has been a recurring drama the past few years. As the article states; every year they claim to be prepared, and every year they are unable to deliver.
We're not *that* many people in Norway (recently hit the 5 million mark), and certainly not that many adults checking their tax returns online. Guesstimate: 1 million? And how many checks it simultaneously? Let's be generous and say half.
So how the hell can a 175 million USD project not be able to deal with 500k visitors? It's a fucking joke.
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You're making me violate my do-not-reply-to-anonymous-cowards policy here, shame on you.
Anyway, come on - it's an ambitious 1B NOK IT project which isn't only rendered unavailable due to "high" traffic, but also contains unforgivable flaws (like exposing "Kenneth") -- THAT, my friend, is a fucking joke, regardless of how profitable it is.
Public Data (Score:2)
All Norwegian tax returns are published publicly on the Internet, so Kenneth's information was already available to anyone who cared to check it. There's been no privacy violation here that I can see.
Re:Public Data (Score:4, Informative)
Ooh! (Score:2)
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:5, Informative)
It's been very briefly reported that this was related to a caching error. This guy's information was apparently cached and then served to everyone.
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wait, what?? I don't even get how that happens. Someone care to enlighten this rock?
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:5, Informative)
That's what happens when you have a problem one year and throw money at it to fix it without a full understanding of the problem and the fix. I'd bet it was outsourced. And I bet they outsource it again next year. I could do better for a lower cost, wouldn't be hard to do better than their performance the last two years.
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:5, Informative)
What is even more funny, just last week, a report leaked in the Norwegian press about this very system being hastily implemented, poorly tested and perhaps insecure.
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:4, Funny)
Accidenture living up to its nickname.
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I'd put it down to Accenture being a MS shop and screwing up the F5 part because they either said "how hard can it be" or they subcontracted out th
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Ah, makes sense. My first guess was "the ever-dangerous auto-increment ID column strikes again!"
But of course I didn't RTFA.
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Oh we do that here in the US too, for most salaried jobs. But then we *also* tax your property, your spending, your savings and then every year we also make you fill out forms that tax you more.
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Mostly because whiny rich people will start screaming about a 45% tax rate. so it's spread out across things.
we are taxed as heavily as many Europeans, but we dont get the good healthcare or infrastructure that works well.
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That depends on where you live. Your local and state taxes vary greatly. In Florida, the tourists pay most of the taxes, in Alaska the oil companies do. As to Federal taxes, they're lower than they've been in my lifetime, and I turn 60 in a couple of weeks. But the Goddamned Illinois state income tax doubled last year. I may move to Missouri when I retire.
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:5, Informative)
> your property
Norway taxes that too [wikipedia.org], on the municipal level.
> your spending
Norway taxes this too: a sales tax (VAT) on the national level, at 25%. No, there is no decimal point missing there.
> your savings
Yup. [wikipedia.org]
Silly Americans complaining about taxes, you haven't seen nothing!
(But actually, I don't think the overall taxation level in Norway is too high, though some of it is pretty regressive, e.g. the VAT)
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LoL and to imagine some countries (like Greece for example) are actually collecting your next years
tax as a sort of down payment. Yep, when paying taxes in 2012 the Greeks are asking taxpayers to pay
upfront for what they are going to earn untill the end of the year.
No wonder that country is head first into debt.
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I'd say Greece has got more of a problem with the fact that in 2011 the total tax paid was USD $1.2 billion, while unpaid taxes amount to USD $77 billion...
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This kind of thing doesn't need a server side cache system. This isn't Facebook.
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Altinn has had problems handling the load on these dates (when people do their taxes) for years.
My guess it's that a caching solution has been hurriedly pushed onto a system poorly set up for it, and accidentally set up to cache login credentials. When the credentials storage method is the right(wrong) type, a single-character typo in Varnish can be enough to do that, causing disaster.
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Yes, it seems the project audit by Veritas found insufficient testing as one of the criticisms raised. Does .Net/Sharepoint have any serious tools for systems testing, like you have a plethora of for Java?
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"This person visited 18:17 and checked his tax return, and for some reason or another we had a caching system hooked up to this site, which didn't belong there".
There, fixed it for 'em.
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the people in charge: "This person visited 18:17 and checked his tax return, and for some reason or another there was an error in the system, and this page entered the so-called cache memory of our servers, where it doesn't belong". You can try to decipher from that what you will.
In other words, either the person who wrote that didn't know what he/she was doing, or else a manager got involved in the software design decisions and forced the programmer to incorporate a blazingly stupid idea.
In either case, someone probably said something vague about "saving cycles" and everyone else nodded.
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Or maybe left hand vs. right hand?
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From the people in charge: "This person visited 18:17 and checked his tax return, and for some reason or another there was an error in the system, and this page entered the so-called cache memory of our servers, where it doesn't belong". You can try to decipher from that what you will.
This is quite easy to interpret. They turned on caching to speed up page loads, but without disabling it for logged in users or sensitive pages, so one user logs in, visits /my_account or whatever, and the page is cached, then when the next 100,000 users visit /my_account the cached page (containing the first user's details) is served without authentication (!). Page caching works great for public pages like / which are served the same to everyone, and doesn't work so great for pages which require authentic
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I'd be willing to bet that it was something turned on, because they needed to lighten the load on the servers. IT could have been a front end caching machine, or on the web server itself in code. In either case, it clearly wasn't tested as well as it should have been.
You *can* cache authenticated pages. Really, the /my_account (your example) only needs to be generated once a year. If that happens to be the main page to view from, you'll keep ending up back on it, to go to
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This is what happens when login credentials are based on the SSN, which is a serialised integer system. One wrong digit doesn't throw an error - it fuckin' logs you in as someone else!
If they didn't have a password, this might possibly do what you have suggested above. I highly doubt access was given without a password, so there's no way one wrong digit would do anything other than 'throw an error'. The problem here does not lie in using integers as user keys.
If it was a caching issue, possibly a page was cached when it shouldn't have been (including someone's account details), and the server returned that single person's page to everyone requesting /my_account or whatever, regardless of
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Improper caching could have happened if the URLs were not unique. But caching in this case is just so wrong. And rarely is it even right. Static data can simply be preloaded in a server as streamlined as a cache would be, and those get delivered at cache speeds. Dynamic data should not be cached except in the browser, and even that with a short expire (5 minutes max).
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Improper caching could have happened if the URLs were not unique. But caching in this case is just so wrong. And rarely is it even right. Static data can simply be preloaded in a server as streamlined as a cache would be, and those get delivered at cache speeds. Dynamic data should not be cached except in the browser, and even that with a short expire (5 minutes max).
Most pages now are not static in any meaningful sense - consider the homepage on almost every website. They have some dynamic data like news, but don't change every second, but may do every few minutes, and thus are cached, and often even on dynamic pages you can cache fragments if not the whole page. Server-side caching is almost always the right thing to do (in conjunction with browser-side caching), if it's done correctly and massively reduces the load on the server, so not sure why you feel it is wrong?
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That's not true. There's a checksum on our SSNs, and the checksum is constructed in such a way that the two most common mistakes in entering SSNs (double one digit, forget another, and transpose two digits) always results in a invalid SSN.
But yes, it's still possible to hit someone elses SSN by accident, but it takes more than one digit wrong. (it takes multiple wrong digits in such a way that the new SSN happens to pass the checksum-test, *and* match an actually used SSN)
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You are completely wrong. SSN like credit card number have control checksums [wikipedia.org]. Up to 2 errors in the SSN could be detected with 100% accuracy, more errors could still be detected with a good probability.
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I believe Norway has similar identification numbers as Sweden, i.e. birthdate, a few other digits and a control digit, if you throw some of the other digits off, it likely won't be a valid number. Besides, these numbers are not secret and you usually need some other form of authentication than just the number, electronic identification, number printed on tax form, etc.
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I believe Norway has similar identification numbers as Sweden, i.e. birthdate, a few other digits and a control digit,
Two digits, actually.
The ID number is of the form:
DDMMYYXXXYZ
The Y and Z are moduli 11 numbers calculated based on fixed multipliers for each preceding digit. There is no way to change one or even two digits without it becoming invalid.
That was not the problem here, of course. If I were to venture a guess, they pull the data, store it, then display it. Without checking well enough whether the data pull succeeded. So if it always fails, everybody will get the last successfully pulled data.
But the real pr
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Yeah we have a similar problem, everything is outsourced to consultants who overcharge for crappy solutions instead of hiring a few competent people to develop and run the systems. A few months ago, some glitch in Tieto's datacenter caused problems for getting prescription drugs, vehicle inspection as well as several commune services, apparently they didn't have any redundancy. IMO, the state should create a public "cloud" service with built-in redundancy which all government services can use, the companies
Re:erm... whoops? (Score:4, Insightful)
threaded app server + global who_is_logged_in variable = big mess
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Wow. Pop. 4 885 240 (source: World Bank)
23 bits will do nicely then.
I think the UK has Local Authorities bigger than that. :-)
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I used to build HPCs. Doesn't require secured logins from the nodes, does when I incorporate remote admin for the head node, but that's to named accounts with passwords from the off. Those admin accounts are created locally from a Master account which is specifically excluded from remote access.
Re:'private' financial data (Score:5, Informative)
Ok - so the deal is this: For everyone in Norway, you can check 3 vital numbers: Amount earned, amount taxed and amount owned of every year. The number are skewed somewhat since they do not cover the full value of your house, it is after certain deductions on your salary, it is with your loans deducted from what you own, etc, but in essence it can give you a ballpark on how much money someone earns.
So, why is this? One of the major reasons is to ostracize anyone that pay little tax as compared to what they earn/own. So you would not need to ask your presidential candidate for his tax record - it is already online: http://skatt.bt.no/skattelister/9397621/Jens%20%20Stoltenberg *. You would also at once see it if your palace-owning neighbour had millions in earnings but payed nothing in taxes.
* This number is from 2009, you now have to login to a governmental site to be able to look up taxes for people. This is to stop malicious use of the numbers.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
The queuing system in Denmark was one provided by a company selling out-sourced queuing systems operated in the cloud. From someone who obviously knew what they were doing.
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Why did you throw the word "socialist" in there as a cheap insult? Do other sorts of government make less of a hash of IT projects?
Rgds
Damon