墨尔本PTE素材库——Census Privacy

墨尔本PTE素材库——Census Privacy

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8月9日census night，但政府网站却瘫痪，这让大家对于自己个人信息的安全性产生了疑问。这篇podcast正是对这一问题给出解释，并试图说服人们，不必担心自己的隐私。9日晚上的事故仅仅是因为过多的人挤入网站，致使其超负荷运作而发生的。

澳大利亚语言学院会定期整理一些PTE的素材库，旨在用这些与Question Criteria高度契合的素材，让大家在平日复习的时候有题可练，有素材可学习，不至于题“荒”。要知道，假如光靠PTE官方所给出的那些复习材料，想要大幅度的提升自身英语水平，是远远不够的。像这篇文章，是罕见的关于信息安全事务的主题。本文词汇不难，内容比较直白，是一篇特别适合练习retell the lecture的素材，同学们也可以作为summarize the text的练习。大家在听完全文后，也可以试着回答这几个问题：

• DDoS发生的原因是什么？
• 大部分澳洲人不想做cencus的原因是什么?
• 对于罪犯而言，信息非常重要的原因是什么？

【Key Vocabulary】

Stuff up v. 堵住，塞住

Distributed Denial of Service 分布式拒绝服务 （一种特殊的网络攻击形式，攻击者将多台受控制的计算机联合起来向目标计算机发起DoS攻击）

Crash v. 网站死机

Hacker n. 黑客

Take down v. 拿下

Get through v. 通过

Give out v. 分发

Hashtag n. 标签

Anxious adj. 焦虑的

People’s identity 人们的身份

Open bank accounts 开设银行账户

Rack up debt 获得借款

Commit crime 犯罪

Blackmail 勒索

Spy on 监视

Boycott  拒绝

Full Transcript

Last week Australia’s biggest survey actually turned into one of Australia’s biggest stuff ups. As millions of Australians sat down on Tuesday night to lodge their personal information the site was shut down. And while it’s working now many people are cautious about using it because they don’t trust their data will be safe. Next we take a closer at exactly what happened and find out why anyone would want to steal our census data anyway.

It was August 9th – the big day – Census day, when Australians all over the nation sat down to fill out the country’s biggest compulsory survey, online. Then this happened, and I wasn’t the only one to hit a digital brick wall.

KID 1: It just crashed.

KID 2: My parents were halfway through filling it out

KID 3: They weren’t really happy with it.

KID 1: It might have been a hacker.

KID 2: An error occurred on the screen saying that the servers were overloaded.

KID 1: It just crashed.

KID 3: And it was quite late at night as well.

So what went wrong? Well the Australian Bureau of Statistics or ABS, which organises the census, says it was forced to shut down the site after it was notified four times of something called a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service. Basically that’s when a site starts to crash because it’s being flooded with more requests for information than it can handle.

Experts say a DDoS can happen if lots of users are trying to access a site at the exact same time. But it’s also a pretty common attack that hackers use to take down a website. They might do that because they don’t like a site or what it stands for, or because they want to prove they can get through an important site’s security, or in rare cases they might use a DDoS to distract while they use other ways to steal data. That last one is what a lot of Australians are now worried about. Even before August 9th, some people didn’t want to give out so much of their personal data to the ABS online. Then hashtag census fail happened and made people even more anxious.

REPORTER: More than two million Australians had already submitted their census survey data before the site was shutdown. That included things like their name, address, earnings, family details and heaps more.

Experts say there are a few reasons why that information would be really valuable to criminals. First, it could be used to steal people’s identities and, with the right know-how, those identities could be used to open bank accounts and rack up debt, or commit crimes. It could also be used to blackmail people by threatening to release their sensitive information publicly. Other countries might want to use the info to spy on Australian citizens. Some defence groups are even concerned terrorists might use stolen census data to plan attacks.

The ABS says it shut down the entire census site when it became clear there were problems, and the government minister in charge says no one should be worried because no personal data was accessed; in fact, he said it four times.

MICHAEL MCCORMACK, CENSUS MINISTER: ABS census security was not compromised, I repeat not compromised and no data was lost, no data was lost.

But despite that, a lot of Aussies are now even less sure about filling out the census than they were before. Some chose to fill it in by paper just in case. Some are boycotting it all together and risking a fine, and others just spent a long time waiting for the site to come back online.

REPORTER: And purchase! Awesome. Right, what was I doing?

(Source: http://www.abc.net.au/btn/story/s4517867.htm)