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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"Due to federal shutdown, the information on this government website is not being maintained and may be out of date"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.
All they did was press "undo"... the shutdown didn't actually change anything. Government agencies were ordered to inconvenience everyone for awhile for entirely political reasons and then were returned to normal operation. That's it.
There was no policy or functionality change. They just disabled systems and then turned them back on again. All the government has to do to coordinate that is... Nothing. CNN basically did it. Government employees and their IT departments were watching the news. When the "shutdown" was ended they just went back to work and turned things on again.
Politics aside, I just don't see why that is impressive. You get the same sort of coordination at every bathroom in the US during Super bowl. Oh half time started!... 100 million toilets flush. That isn't organization anymore then every cock crowing at dawn or fish showing up at the surface of the water at dusk and dawn. Its like giving people credit for all commuting at the same time in the morning.
Would be nice to know which sites took eight days though.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
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.
significan7ly
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
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.
i normally don't comment on politics in USA but - the president of USA needs to sign law bill to end shutdown? wow couldn't their parliament/congress whatever just end the shutdown that they started and ask federal workers to go back to work? talk about lots of red tape
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....
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.