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USDA is down
- droopybuns 13y agoOh emm gee. what will we do without google cache?
- freework 13y agoHow cute.
- na85 13y agoWow, such melodrama.
- eps 13y agoJust got en email from a client who is with the Dept. of Agriculture and he said "it looks like the government is shutting down on Tuesday" and for the life of me I just couldn't understand what that was referring to.
- LAMike 13y agoPR stunt or massive budget decreases in government services? Either way it's not a good place to be in as a country.
- scarmig 13y agoMy guess is more the former than the latter. Then again, federal spending can be pretty funky in how Congress requires it be spent. I'd love to see all the information on how the decision to shut down the site was made.
- SolarNet 13y agoWell if they have a server farm or cloud server on which the website is hosted it likely needs power and bandwidth (or money for a cloud service). Either they disappear completely or put up a static page.
- Steuard 13y agoIs this purely symbolic, or is there some real sense in which replacing the USDA website with a placeholder saves the government a measurable amount of money?
- nwh 13y agoSymbolic really. The same servers are sitting there, just idle rather than pumping out pages.
- SolarNet 13y agoNot if they can't pay for the power or system administrators to support them for an undefined amount of time. Better to switch to a simple single server now than let the web page get hacked, fail slowly, or disappear completely.
- bsdetector 13y agoIf they have legal requirements like a report of contamination or unsafe conditions is investigated within N days after being received their only option may be to not accept the report at all. Unless everybody involved in the whole process is an essential worker.
- palidanx 13y agoReports of contamination would most likely go through the FDA for announcements.
- abalone 13y agoFalse dichotomy. It could well be that many parts of the site don't function correctly without staff. For example processing submissions, keeping critical data up to date, etc.
- Shank 13y agoThis is a little confusing. The USDA's website is presumably hosted on some server, so what exactly is preventing it from remaining online? I mean, the domain is clearly still here, and there's a web page serving that error, so...
- dotmanish 13y agoThe funding to support server + bandwidth + sysadmins.
- rob05c 13y agoJust speculating, but perhaps the IT person(s) responsible for maintaining the site are nonessential, and considered a simple placeholder safer than leaving the full site online and unattended?
- SolarNet 13y agoThat IT person has 4 hours to shut-down the agency internet presence for an indeterminate amount of time. Also, their server farm may not have power in 4 days, better to set up a simple website on some "essential" box somewhere. Especially since the USDA receives information from across the country and performs statistical analysis. It would be safer to shutdown the dynamic services rather than let it get hacked. In 4 hours they probably do not have enough time to separate dynamic and static information when they also have to do a backup and a bunch of paperwork.
- throwaway9848 13y agoActual information on the effects of the shutdown on the USDA, for those interested in that sort of thing: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agriculture-idUSL1N0HQ1W420130930 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-agricul...
- aethr 13y agoNow that is very interesting. According to this article, earlier this year meat and poultry inspectors were designated 'essential personnel', meaning that they can continue to work even during a government shutdown. This is important because it's against the law to sell meat in the US if it hasn't been inspected by a USDA inspector. Imagine the outcry if this government shutdown meant that all meat and poultry sales in the US halted until an agreement was reached.
- Tzunamitom 13y agoI'd be one happy vegetarian!
- easytiger 13y agoWould you? Economic forces would drive up the cost of your fodder.
- Tzunamitom 13y agoIn the short-term perhaps, but if it lasted a while the reverse would be true as the market would be flooded with excess fodder production that would drive down the price of my fodder (Amount of grain needed to end extreme hunger - 40 million tonnes. Amount of grain fed to animals in the West - 540 million tonnes. United Nations)
- ferdo 13y agonsa.gov is still up, so they do have some priorities.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob2 13y agoThey're down now, although it almost seems more like a DDoS ("Taking too long to respond").
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoA pandering PR stunt by an overgrown bureaucracy. (The USDA is the home of the rabbit inspectors, bravely protecting our children from risky pet bunnies.)
- palidanx 13y agoThe USDA agriculture arm (USDA ARS) actually does some really good work with nutrition scientific lab data (USDA SR-25) I've also talked to several of the scientists for work, and they are quite the bright bunch and a lot do good research work. However, I don't see why they couldn't leave the server up at least through October as I actually need to read a lot of their latest work.
- oscilloscope 13y agoThis is a very rich and high-quality dataset. I started using it to learn data visualization a few years ago and have been tinkering with it in parallel coordinates ever since. http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/raw/3150059/ http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/raw/3150059/
- olefoo 13y agoSo the USDA is largely responsible for our having some of the safest food on the planet. I mean you can mock it all you want, but if USDA meat inspectors aren't there to watch over the production; you might want to consider becoming a lot more vegetarian for a while. I mean, unless you really like eating cows infected with MRSA or Mutton with a side of scrapie... Seriously, if meat inspection goes by the wayside for any length of time; people will die, because it won't be anybody's job to make sure the meat is safe and the folks who run meat-packing plants don't like that they can't wring every last bit of profit out of every animal they buy.
- SolarNet 13y agoI realize that people are a little annoyed at this tact, and think it is melodramatic. But consider: * The servers may be hosted on a cloud system, and there is now no way to pay for them. (Even if the bill is due in 4 days, the employees can't do the work 4 days from now, they have to do it now.) * Some of the information may be time sensitive, and the submission of forums may rely on employee feedback. These services may not be easy enough to remove in the time they have available to shut-down. * Even if hosted in house, if the systems break, or are hacked into, then nothing can be done fix them. Better to deploy a hardened static page now than be infected with malware running massive botnets when they get back. * They may have to turn off the utilities to their server farm, so they can't support anything but a simple static page. * They have 4 hours to do all that, fill out some paperwork, and still make a backup, and whatever other responsibilities they have (like internal servers). The USDA in specific also handles dynamic data from across the country, so more than some, they have worries about being hacked and having their data screwed with.
- jonchang 13y agoPretty much this. Note that other government websites are also shut off or otherwise not updating, e.g.: http://www.aoc.gov/ http://www.aoc.gov/ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/ http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-A06.html http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2013/13-A06.html
- BWStearns 13y agoAll of this is true, but the lights are still on, and the T1 line is still piped into their building (not confirmed by visual evidence but it would cost more to shut it down and restart it barring a crisis causing shutdown >1month). Either they think the shutdown is lasting a while or their CTO/CWhateverO has a sense of humor.
- SolarNet 13y agoThey have to prepare for an uncertain amount of time. I think the botnet/hacking concerns are more notable. Especially since the USDA collects information from across the country.
- lukeman 13y agoSomehow Heaven's Gate still manages to keep its site going fifteen years after its members committed suicide.
- badave 13y agoI thought they shut down Geocities years ago?
- _delirium 13y agoThere are some advantages to having a purely static-HTML website, in terms of unattended maintainability. In addition to the government, it seems many companies don't have one anymore. If servers get compromised, it's common for companies to just take the whole site down pending a fix, and replace it with a single HTML splash page. If they had a full-featured static-HTML version of the site, they could fail over to something more complete than one HTML page, but that seems uncommon.
- ck2 13y agoYeah who needs that pesky regulation of food quality anyway. Now if gun permits were suspended, it would get an exemption almost immediately.
- anonymoushn 13y agoYour gun permit is in the bill of rights. Why do you need a web site for that?
- ck2 13y agoSo is your right to vote - why do we need voter registration?
- CamperBob2 13y agoWhere?
- ck2 13y ago14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th, 26th amendments? Took them awhile to get it spelled out. But it also took them 100 years to end slavery. One might also suggest the freedom from searches and seizures is also fairly clear. Be sure to tell that the TSA agent that is groping your genitals. Oh and the TSA is still fully funded.
- fsck--off 13y agoThe Constitution does not explicitly give you the right to vote in the same way that it gives you the right to free speech. Wikipedia has this to say about it: "The "right to vote" is not explicitly stated in the U.S. Constitution except in the above referenced amendments, and only in reference to the fact that the franchise cannot be denied or abridged based solely on the aforementioned qualifications. In other words, the "right to vote" is perhaps better understood, in layman's terms, as only prohibiting certain forms of legal discrimination in establishing qualifications for suffrage. States may deny the "right to vote" for other reasons." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St...
- bparsons 13y agoWhat the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome". It is a political tactic, wherein you deny the public access to the most visible aspects of a government operation during a period of budget cuts. You will notice all government agencies ceasing stuff like twitter accounts, which cost virtually nothing to operate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome
- darkarmani 13y ago> What the USDA is doing is called "Washington Monument Syndrome". Where will all the school kids visit if the USDA website is down? What about all of the international tourists that finally made the trip to the USDA website? You make a completely valid comparison, because everyone knows that after the Washington Monument, the USDA is the most beloved site.
- smsm42 13y agoShouldn't it be renamed "White House tours syndrome" now?
- briandear 13y agoThe US Consulate in Marseille, France is open for normal business today. I guess getting a US visa or passport renewal is a critical function that can't wait a week.
- josh2600 13y agoNSA.gov is down. http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nsa.gov
- fpgeek 13y agoIronically, you can't straightforwardly get to the USDA contingency plans. The whitehouse.gov link on the page points to an index of all the contingency plans (across the federal government). Unfortunately, the entries for the USDA plans are just links pointing back to usda.gov... I'd imagine you might get somewhere at archive.org (and there may well be other ways to get them from a .gov source), but still...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ck2 13y agotsa.gov is still fully operational http://www.tsa.gov/ http://www.tsa.gov/
- SolarNet 13y agoWell that's basically just a static blog site anyway. The USDA site had dynamic information, statistics, graphs. The IT infrastructure for USDA is probably much more complicated than the TSA.
- ForFreedom 13y agoWhat has a funding got to do with a website being up, the servers are still running.
- nodata 13y agoIf it's down, don't link to it.
- rob05c 13y agoDoes anyone know who designates essential personnel? (5 mins of Google didn't return an answer) Could the President designate all federal employees as "essential," to circumvent the budget requirement? (Yes, this would be a power grab by the Executive branch)
- briandear 13y agoThe healthcare.gov site certainly works. This whole thing is nothing more than two fat guys arguing over the last piece of sausage. It's theater. From my perch in Avignon, France it's actually pretty entertaining. Watching Sheila Jackson Lee's caps-lock shouting 'speech' and wondering if the speaker of the House is going to start crying is good fun.
- abalone 13y agoIt's likely this is more than political. There's a lot of work they'd need to do to disable just the parts of the site that would cease to function without backend staff, or place appropriate disclaimers on out-of-date information, which drives literally billions of dollars in economic activity. Four hours isn't enough time for that.
- smsm42 13y agoWhere four hours came from? Talk about govt shutdown was out there for days if not weeks. And this is not the first time - n this administration, almost every year we're on the precipice of the shutdown. If they didn't have a contingency plan that enables them to put an emergency header on top of all pages on the site - they're doing it wrong.
- SolarNet 13y agoThe agencies are given a single half day to shutdown.
- smsm42 13y agoGiven by whom? Were they kept in the cave without access to TV and newspapers for the last month? Did not they know it is a possibility? Did not they know it is a possibility now for years since we have a split Congress which can not pass a proper budget for years? Why they had to prepare for this entirely foreseeable circumstance in half a day - US govt can not afford one risk management specialist that could evaluate such circumstances and prepare a plan?
- SolarNet 13y agoThey did: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2013/m-13-22.pdf http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/... They have 4 hours, using emergency funds appropriated for exactly this situation, to prepare the agency to be shuddered for an unknown amount of time. They have to make backups, close out current time sensitive issues, fill out paperwork about what went wrong with the plan so people can recover if someone else has to do it.
- robomartin 13y agoI fully expect Obama and Democrats to use every available tactic to make this as painful as possible for the population. They truly need to have the US wake-up to an apocalyptic scenario. Anything less than that and people are going to see that the emperor has no clothes. If they could have airplanes falling out of the sky, they would. If they truly use such tactics I really hope people take them to task for it. With nearly four million people working for the federal government --a good deal of them solidly in the Democrat camp-- I fully expect them to terrorize us by fucking things up to the extent of their abilities. As for the argument of cloud servers and other services in the private sector causing shutdowns, the question is very simple: Anyone thinking that the US isn't going to pay for these services is a moron. This shutdown will last as long as it does and then everyone will get their checks. Anything to the contrary is pure theater. I just got an email from whitehouse.gov full of FUD. It's a disgrace that whitehouse.gov is being used this way (this isn't the first time). Democrats would raise hell if Republicans were in power and used whitehouse.gov for partisan propaganda. What a shame. Tomorrow is likely to be the US politics version of Kabuki Theater. Could be fun to watch.