Australian Politics Forum

Quote:

Tony Abbott was best man at Peter Slipper’s wedding.

So Abbott has been caught with his hand in the conspiracy jar & the first place he decided to go was with the IT problem angle. Having worked in the industry for a long time (almost 20 years), I felt it was my duty to explain how Abbott’s line that “during April the computer server timestamps were sometimes out by up to 10 hours” was wrong, & why it was at best improbably, at worse, impossible.

Let’s take this on face value: the Australian Parliament House (APH) network, like most corporate & government networks, is a complex beast. Spanning politicians on all sides of parliament & public servants alike, security is paramount. To maintain the level of security in APH time is essential.

If you work in IT, you know that setting a clock even 1hr out your network will fall over, the tolerances for Windows Server is 5 minutes difference in time. Even if you set a different timezone, Windows Server will not accept login credentials from a client computer if the time is more than 5 minutes out.

This, however, is not what Abbott is claiming. He is claiming that the SERVER was out by 10 hours, which means the WHOLE of the APH network should have been out by 10hrs. This is obviously not the case, otherwise this massive IT failure would have cause chaos during April 2012 in APH. You would have thought such a massive administrative failure would be headline news, not unlike the recent transition from Exchange to Office 365 that exposed calendars of politicians.

So how could the time be set wrong if all these boxes are ticked? Well, there are two ways: when the server was initially set up the person doing so just clicked through rather than reading the prompts, this, however, would give the system a -8:00GMT (US Pacific) time zone, not GMT (10hrs out). The other way is for a domain admin like myself to set the Active Directory (AD) server to 10 hours out & attempt to propagate it across the network. This will mostly not work as AD updates in 15 minute increments & the time is synchronised during this phase. If the servers connected to the AD server are out by 10hrs, they will not synchronise as the Kerberos Server (Windows Server’s authentication protocol) will reject their authentication requests.

The last ditch effort for Abbott would be the files being created locally on a computer that’s 10hrs out, then moved to the files to the server. This, however, would still show the actual time of creation according to the server time zone, not the client. Add to this, Abbott would not have been able to connect to the network if his laptop was 10hrs out.

http://youtu.be/T4nuELIPh3E

TIME IS EVERYTHING

According to separate reports, the time the documents could be created are 11:08pm or 11:32pm. Considering the document was sent at 9:17am the next day, if the clocks were 10hrs out, that would mean the document was created, typed up, & converted to PDF 9 minutes before being sent out, or, it was created AFTER being sent. Something doesn’t match up here, & I’m sure email, server, & support ticket logs will show that the documents were indeed created prior to The Australian publishing the story the press release was in relation to.

So what does this mean? Well, Abbott is both lying & embroiled in the Ashby affair. We know that Brough, Pyne & Bishop have all played their part in this, so how could Abbott not be involved? He has already shown contempt for democratically elected politicians with his Australians for Honest Politics slush fund, the Ashby case fits the same modus operandi.

UP TO HIS EYEBALLS

Abbott’s attempt to use technical excuses in the Ashby/Brough affair shows that he is not only heavily involved, but it’s clear he is trying to cover up his involvement in a conspiracy to bring down a sitting member of parliament, & the legitimate government of Australia.

Seeing as there are no journalists willing to run forensics on these files, I have requested to see the PDFs, documents & emails from said journos. I will update this post as more information comes to light.

Notice the difference, & the times Abbott’s PDF was edited.

continue

Quote:

[UPDATE 1: I have obtained PDFs edited on 23/04/12 (after the press release) & it seems the timezone information has been modified to show it as UTC on the 23/04/12 at around 9:30am. By default MS word outputs PDFs in local time as you can see by the following image. The top one is Abbott’s press release, the bottom from a PDF I just output from MS Word.

[UPDATE 2]: To clarify, the top dates are from Abbott’s PDF & clearly show that 1) it was created in MS Word, which only supports LOCAL time zone dates, & 2) that the “Created On” date has been edited to have a “Z” (UTC) instead of “+10’00′” as the “Modified Date” shows. This is a glaring discrepancy & shows that the documents were edited before being submitted to APH. Even if this is the case, the 2nd document sent in the press release would have to have been created AFTER it was sent if the time zone was indeed UTC. I have tested to see if a document created within UTC time zone would output with a Z as the time zone code, it will not when exported for MS Word, the time zone code defaults to “+00’00′”, the only time you will get a Z time zone denotation is if you export via Adobe Acrobat itself & not with the Microsoft Word PDF export. We can clearly see this is not the case from the “PDF Creator” & “PDF Producer” line.

Keep the tweets coming in if I’m not clear enough, but this is getting way out of layman’s terms.

[UPDATE 3]: The PDF created by the same user (mcdulingg) submitted from the day before clearly shows “+10’00′” (AEST) time zone. So that’s that, the date has been modified on the 23/04/12 to attempt to show the time zone as UTC.

PDF from 20/04/12 by user mcdulingg

http://sortius-is-a-geek.com/?p=2626

tony could be called the "unwise one" ;)

this I agree is BULLSHIT...

can we have some reality...my computer went down for almost a week......so what..who cares.. lifes a bitch.. poo happens..who cares.. get a life.

"Keep the tweets coming in if I’m not clear enough, but this is getting way out of layman’s terms"

It must be Anonymous

expect us Tony ha! ha!

Ex Dame Pansi wrote on Dec 15^th, 2012 at 7:08am:

"Keep the tweets coming in if I’m not clear enough, but this is getting way out of layman’s terms"

It must be Anonymous

expect us Tony ha! ha!

you mean earthlings dont you??? being a greenie and all.

wait till China or Nth Korea command the galaxy.,..

we will al be in deadset trouble

Phony Tony's lies unravelling but still the morons play their three wise monkeys routine.

Skippy I am just waiting for the forum IT expert to come on here and say that the time can be change easy or some other just shyte.

I think you know how I mean he said he was a IT expert when the debate was about the NBN.

John S wrote on Dec 15^th, 2012 at 8:06am:

not sure why anyone would be bothered listening to you to be honest with the headbashing avatar and the scrolling which drives me bonkers..and makes me think I am dealing with someone who has a [size=16]problem[/size]

a BIG problem.

Cods is so desperate to divert from the fact that Abbott is caught out lying again, she's now attacking avatars !!! :D :D :D

perhaps you could log off and go away if it bothers you so much !!!! No one will miss the crap you write anyway.

Don't worry about it.

Abbott will be out on his big ears soon.

Even labor voters would vote for Turnbull - so guess who will be the next PM?

cods wrote on Dec 15^th, 2012 at 8:30am:

John S wrote on Dec 15^th, 2012 at 8:06am:

Listen you silly old fool.

You don't run the site FD does and until he tells me or I decide to take them off they stay on here. There is nothing in the boards rules to say I can't have them.

If you don't like them stiff bickkies.

If you don't like what I post you can keep watching A Current Affair, Today Tonight, Skynews, keep reading the Herald Sun, The Telegraph, The Australian and keep your radio dial on 2GB and just get one side of the story.

I will keep posting the from different web sites so people can get both sides of the story and make their own mind on what to believe and what not to believe.

Do you truly believe that this story would be in any of the MSN?

Abbott is guilty as charged.

Hang em high.

Quote:

I’ve been working in public sector IT for the better part of 7 years now, starting off as a lowly help desk operator and working my way up through the ranks to the senior technical consultant position I find myself in today. I’m not telling you this to brag (indeed I don’t believe I’m completely unique in this regard) rather I want to impress upon you the level of familiarity I have when it comes to government IT systems. I’ve worked in departments ranging from mere hundreds of employees to the biggest public service organisation that exists within Australia. So when I say Tony Abbott’s office isn’t giving us the full story on this whole Peter Slipper incident and the subsequent time zone argument they used to defend their position you’ll know that I’m not just making stuff up.

For reference his whole argument has been thoroughly debunked by Sortius in his brilliant 10 hours of bullshit where he shows that the document has had its date modified to show a 10 hour discrepancy. Back when it was first published he was just going off public information but recent updates to the post have seen him get his hands on the original press release with an unmodified date on them, showing that the press release was indeed drafted the night before. You’d think that’d be the last of it (and indeed if it was I would’ve simply tweeted it again) however the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) has gone on record saying that they have identified a problem with the time stamps on the files in question and have backed up Abbott’s side of the story.

Reporters have since been granted access to the PC and shown similar files which seem to suffer the same Zulu time zone problem that apparently plagues the press release in question. What wasn’t investigated was whether or not files created in the way that Sortius has shown suffer from the same issue, I.E. is there an on-going technical issue with that particular computer or are those files the result of the same kind of tampering that the press release appears to have undergone. That would go some way to explaining what’s going on here but it doesn’t explain why the time stamp shows a Zulu time zone which Microsoft word isn’t capable of producing.

Indeed doing a little research for myself shows that PDFs created from Microsoft Word’s PDF creator plugin will always show created/modified dates that are more or less identical and reflect the current time it was created (not the time when the original word document was created). If we’re to believe that there was some problem with the PC that caused the Z to appear it follows that it should have been the same for both the created date and the modified date. The fact that there’s a discrepancy gives credence to the idea that the PDF was first created using the Word PDF exporter and then modified afterwards using another program. The original document, the one shown in the final update from Sortius, shows some differences in created/modified times however it appears that was created using the PDFMaker Plugin for Word and then later modified in Adobe Distiller (not the same way as the metadata in the modified press release indicates).

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that Abbott was aware of this information but it does implicate that someone working for him did. In attempting to track down just who it was who created the PDF I came across 2 probable people (one person who I think works at DPS and a Brisbane based ghost writer) but I wasn’t able to verify it was actually one or the other. Whoever did write it would be able to provide some insights into this whole thing but it’s unlikely that they’ll ever come forward, especially considering the fact that they would’ve been working for Abbott at the time (and may still be).

All of this points in the direction that something is going on over there and that further investigation is definitely warranted. I know there’s several other things I could do to either verify or debunk this theory completely should I have more open access to said system but I doubt we’ll get anything more than the guided tour that was given to the ABC journalists already. If I still had people I knew working at DPS you can be assured that I’d get the full story from them but alas, I came up dry on this one. Sortius is still on the case though and I’m very interested to see what DPS has to say about the current discrepancies and will keep you posted on the progress.

http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2012/12/18/a-tale-of-woe-and-pdf-creators-or-dig-up-abbott-dig-up/

Australian Politics Forum
http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl General Discussion >> Federal Politics >> 10 HOURS OF (bullsh)IT http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1355518071 Message started by the wise one on Dec 15^th, 2012 at 6:47am