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Shutdown Illustrates How Fast US Gov't Can Update Its Websites
An anonymous reader writes "Despite what we hear about how much the U.S. government is struggling with a website, it is reassuring that most of government entities can update their websites within a day after they are asked to. This conclusion is the result of research done by the Networking Systems Laboratory at the Computer Science Department of the University of Houston. The research team tracked government websites and their update times, and found that 96% of the websites were updated within 24 hours after President Obama signed HR 2775 into law, ending the Government shutdown. Worth noting that two websites took 8 days to update. It is interesting that the team was able to use the shutdown as an opportunity to study the efficiency of the IT departments of various parts of Government."
to take something down than to make something new.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
for fscks sake.
Doesn't it make the assumption that there was no lead time? The shutdown had been threatened for weeks.
Did the IT departments wait for the order to be signed before beginning any work on the updated sites or did they start the updates before the order was signed and then just flip the site over to the update version once the shutdown was confirmed?
mv index.html old_index.html ; mv no_longer_block_access_to_static_data.html index.html
The sites that blocked by DNS wouldn't have much more to do.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"Due to federal shutdown, the information on this government website is not being maintained and may be out of date"
..and now THIS ("Nuthin' up the sleeve..")
.
PRESTO! It has disappeared!
Gently reply
Those are your CIO's that need to be promoted (or terminated, depending on the actual intent of the government these days) :(
:)
Anyway.. notice on TFA how most of the sites are restored after 8am. Lazy bastages!
Should we expect it to take much time to post a new notice or change some text on the front page of a website? How much does that involve the IT department assuming their front page is setup with some CMS that allows content to be posted with minimal technical effort? There is a big difference between changing the functionality of a website and slapping some notice on there with a default "page unavailable" message for none front page stuff. Heck, there can be a big difference between just changing text on a front page, and changing text that has detailed information, with the latter probably having to go through more people to check the actual content.
... if there was a real shutdown, nobody would have been paid to put "shutdown" notices on websites.
Is it really all that surprising that well established web sites with well established update procedures are easily updated? A lot of it probably consists of collecting any updated information and running some script to update the web site. Someone is no doubt tasked with doing this as regular part of their job.
Exactly.
The websites were intentionally changed to display a notice they had been "shutdown" . If they had been shutdown, no one would have seen a notice.
What's more, many important sites with automated data feeds that I access stayed up and pumping out data, meaning someone was still taking a measurement too as the process is not automated.
It was nothing more than both fracking parties trying to make the other guy look like an asshole at OUR expense and frustration.
Vote every single one of those pricks out of office over the next two elections. The next president should meet a house and senate with no incumbents at all.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I noticed that within hours after the shutdown ended, foxnews.com was featuring stories about Benghazi again ("the questions Americans STILL want answers for!") using their rather large top headline font.
Stories about the shutdown/re-opening/GOP infighting were completely buried for days afterwards.
Yeah the scary bit are the 8-dayer folks tha over-complicated their "shutdown" process to the point that they couldn't restore the service by 8:01 am local time.
Yeah, it's like lights out when the last employee leaves for the shutdown and to be surprised they all managed to switch the lights back on when they returned to work. Well, almost all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is a ridiculous comparison. The data are from two completely different proceedures, from a technical perspective.
Taking a functional government website, like say Astronomy Picture of the Day
To make it 'not work' all they have to do is whip up a basic "this site shutdown due to..." with a few HTML tags and its is "taken down due to the shutdown"
That's all...a few lines of HTML and a redirect!
Second, the criticism of the Obamacare website in the media is not representative of the ***ACTUALL*** technical problems.
Politics aside, the website problems were **routine IT work**...its not an excuse, but **management** is to blame for not scheduling testing with enough time before rollout...
So, this data is doubly unusuable...but it makes sense...
**of course** sites like Astronomy Picture of the Day were up in 24 hrs after the shutdown lifted!!!!! It just took a few lines of code!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Probably a majority of the delays can be attributed to bureaucracy. I work in small local government and I see it all the time: something that should take an hour takes 3 weeks due to people scheduling meetings to discuss meetings about when meetings will take place with IT.
Vote every single one of those pricks out of office over the next two elections. The next president should meet a house and senate with no incumbents at all.
It feels good to say that but unless you force all of the lobbyists to be just as inexperienced as the incoming Congresspeople it could be a disaster.
There is a great misunderstanding in all these comments. The question isn't "How long does it take to change 3 lines of code", of course that only takes a few minutes. The question is: "How long does permission to change 3 lines of code take to wend its way through the agency from the Secretary to the contractor?" That typically takes weeks or months, but in this case was done quickly because no one between the Secretary and the coder thought to interfere. That is very unusual. Another question (not answered) is how long does it take for a request from the coder to the Secretary? Typically that would be "forever", which is why most things never get done. It would help if someone below the secretary were authorized to make a decision, but typically that isn't the case.
The IT person may have been laid off or on vacation. Or, someone was never assigned to the reactivate the webpages. Who knows? The US is/has been run by idiots that don't care about the population other than how to exploit it. When voting in the future look into whether the candidates are not only intelligent but know how the underpinnings of communication function. Don't vote for "change" or "cut costs". Vote for someone that has proven that they can get things done in an open and honest way. IS that even possible?
glad you posted that...I'm a fan of APOD and I remember seeing that but couldn't locate it
Thank you Dave Raggett
I think the point missed in all of this (including my brief scan of the article) is that not all website changes require or even involve IT departments. As a matter of fact, I'd really be curious as to how many websites are under the purview of IT. I can tell you that in 15+ years of web development, I can only think of one or two web sites that I've worked on have had regular involvement with IT. Maybe it's different at the government level, I'm going to call "gross generalization" on this one.
... about anything web related.
Because redirecting a website to a static page is completely trivial. As simple as renaming two files.
the enemy
A year ago we learned that a private company like Apple "for technical reasons" needed 14 days to update a page with a simple text message. They sought to delay complying with the UK court order that would expose lies that had hurt Samsung.
Government websites, despite exhibiting worst-of-the-worst bureaucracy known to all of us, now show a tangible "worst case" upper bound. Great! now we can point all private companies' lying lawyers to that and ask why the private sector is suddenly 7 times slower.
Seems like a desperate attempt to make the government look less incompetent.
People are always complaining that that our government can't work together, especially on the environment.
Perhaps unintentionally, you completely renewed my faith in our political system when you shared that, "Many actually turned off the servers."
Clearly Democrats and Republicans CAN work together on the environment.
The "great shutdown of 2013" was a bipartisan effort to curb global warming!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
---
Always look on the bright side of life....
The real trick is to find people who can't be bought and convince them to run for office. Most Americans know that it's a thankless job in a corrupt culture where little can actually be accomplished. And anyone who is qualified for the job is smart enough to know that they don't want the job.
We could use a few more of those who, despite not wanting the job, are willing to take a term out of their private life for the greater good.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Sometimes I think we'd be better off if Congress was selected by lottery from a list of registered voters. Yeah, we'd get some duds but at least they wouldn't be tied to their big campaign donors.
Hunger Games: Congress Edition. Probably a good idea, actually. Until that one catastrophic group of complete idiots gets bamboozled by one powerful individual.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
All the had to do is do a redirect from all to a "sorry charlie" page via their load balancer or Akamai. Then simply undo it later. Why it's so easy EVEN a Windows guy could have done it.