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Visa Systems Issues
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jpatokal 11y agoThis apparently started on June 10th, so down for 12 days and counting!
- bigiain 11y agoIn entirely unrelated news: June 4th - OPM breach announced. June 12th - OPM confirms security clearance records exposed. I'm glad I don't have an urgent need to US visa or passport or any form of vaguely federal security or residency or travel related paperwork to go through.
- f00barbazb00 11y agoSo they're saying We're terrible and we don't care that much. Wow. If this where a business, they'd be losing customers... but thankfully, they're a government apparatus that holds people over a barrel and doesn't have to provide enough decent service to offer enough visas to meet the demand, hence 12-30 million undocumented immigrants.
- codecamper 11y agoWhat is government but a bunch of provided services? We could replace it with well written software. No?
- jacalata 11y agoTechnically, sure (assuming you also build the robot hardware) but we're quite far from having software that can negotiate treaties, figure out how to regulate water rights in California, etc...
- codecamper 11y agoWell of course I don't mean to completely replace the government. But how about making it more lean? How about modernizing with the times? How about making it all much more transparent and accountable? Couldn't open source software do all of this? We could start with systems that are used by smaller, poorer countries & grow from there. A visa processing system might be a good start.
- pratnala 11y agoI completely agree with this. First, we need to make the lawmakers that such a system is necessary which is understandably, a bigger challenge.
- logfromblammo 11y agoThe keystone service is cartel enforcer. That's probably not something that should ever take the human out of the decision-making loop. When the service is essentially, "I hold the same gun to everyone's head to make sure that everyone follows the same rules," you really don't want that automated. Leaving aside the issue of whether such a service needs to be centralized or to exist at all, if you substitute human evaluation for a set of algorithmic rules, a systems cracker can corrupt the entire cartel more easily than someone individually subverting possibly thousands of independent human actors. In terms of many of the other services typically provided by government, yes, those could potentially be replaced by software.
- smm2000 11y agoMost good companies have extensive interview process to hire new employees - this is most direct comparison with getting new immigrants to the country. Comparison with having 12-30 million illegals in US is the Caltrain deciding not to eject drunk hobos living under overpass for tresspassing. Instead of getting immigrants compete on education/skills/job experience/employee referrals (aka relatives) like Canada, Australia or NZ, US allows unprofitable, illiterate and low skill immigrants into the country.
- dogma1138 11y agoThe US has a process for highly skilled workers as well, not an easy one but it exists. I don't have the numbers but looking at the amount of illegal immigration into Europe, and looking at what "jobs" most of the semi-legal (refugees, asylum seekers etc.) who also outweigh the amount of high skill labor coming into Europe I won't say this is a US specific problem. I would also suspect that Canada with it's point based system has the same issue as well. Their immigration system is just more publicized and was given a priority especially during the late 90's and early 2000's since they felt like they were losing the competitiveness with US based companies. Heck I've been to Canada 3 times in the past 5-6 years and the amount of what i would assume is "illegal" immigration in some of the cities there seems to also be quite high, quite a high percentage of Asian and African decent workers that don't speak English or French and seem to be very wary of people in general.
- contingencies 11y agoHA-clustered microservices: 1 Dated megaliths: 0 (Edit: Sheesh, what's with all the downvotes? Hardware failures are a route-aroundable thing that should never cause downtime... as long as you don't adopt an outdated "here sits the one source of truth, and its name is [fat server manually configured]" psychology. HA clustering is at the point where it's a generic, drop-in thing for arbitrary services. If you fail to recognize the above, go do some learning.)
- karambahh 11y agoDoes anyone else think that, all conspiracy theory aside, the information published is only partly true? If it's a purely hw issue, say a piece of highly specialized hardware (hw crypto, piece of old mainframe, etc), it can take a very long time to source it (although a SPOF is surprising in such a critical infrastructure), but it does not take 100 people to work on it, 24/7. It requires a dozen guys making angry phone calls every 2 hours to some suppliers... If it really takes 100 people 24/7, mostly likely explanation to me is that it's software related and they have to rewrite a critical sw in record time. Causes: -bugfix (which may be entirely unrelated to secrity) -emergency migration from one hw vendor to another, for sourcing reason which entails rewrite of a part of the system.
- wisty 11y agoMaybe there are 2,147,483,647 rows are in a table with the id signed int32? 2 billion isn't such a big number.
- raphman_ 11y agoHmm, given they already had 'billions of rows' [1] (though probably distributed across many tables), they might have been wise enough to plan for this. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9756534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9756534
- bigiain 11y ago"100 people to work on it, 24/7" sounds like manual data entry to me - who wants to bet against a loss of a db without usable backups available, and a bunch of people now hand entering hardcopy forms and data out of emails back into some critical database?
- userbinator 11y agoI would be surprised if they didn't use OCR with possibly human checking.
- 11y ago
- istvan__ 11y agoSuch a muppet show this entire situation there.
- f00barbazb00 11y agoStatler and Waldorf are especially hilarious.
- istvan__ 11y agoI wish others would also appreciate a little bit of humor on HN, but everything like that gets downvoted all the time.
- processing 11y agoI'm waiting for an advanced parole visa (moved to the US in January) and can't get a visa in time to travel intentionally to my best friends wedding in the UK. Applied in Feb. Got told last week they need another 2 months to process it - I wonder if this is why?
- beagle3 11y agoSchedule a personal meeting at your closest USCIS (or whatever the immigration office is called these days) and explain it to the officer. They can give you a temporary "paper pass" you can use to travel until paperwork completes if they find your reason sufficient. Best friend's wedding might not qualify as a good enough reason, but combined with the long delay it might - definitely worth your time talking to them. I know someone who got this kind of pass to visit her sick father.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- davepage 11y agoTook 14 months with Congressional intervention just to get my partner a immigrant visa -- which is presumably the easiest. America has been so obsessed with thinking of itself as the "best country in the world!(TM)" for so long, it has meanwhile regressed into a failed state.
- joelrunyon 11y agoAs much as the US has inefficiencies, the hyperbole is a bit strong. There's quite a difference between being the "best country in the world" and a "failed state."
- scintill76 11y agoAmerican Exceptionalism, etc. bother me too (an American), but it seems a bit incongruous to call it a failed state while simultaneously relating the story of someone desiring to immigrate to it so badly that they'd wait 14 months and get Congress to intervene. If it's so failed, your partner can leave and I'm sure someone else will be happy to come.
- davepage 11y agoOf course I am a hypocrite. My partner wants to visit the US; I would prefer to live elsewhere. But, sometimes compromise is needed in relationships. 'failed state' is certainly hyperbole here -- there are large elements of society which continue to function, despite the problems at the national government level. It would truly be a failed state if, for example, the national government's performance level were propagated to the whole society.
- DrScump 11y agoWhy would you bring your partner into a "failed state?"
- ajkjk 11y agoCertainly the mindset/passive prejudice that America is the "best country in the world (TM)" did not become a thing because of our once-fast Visa processing times.
- f00barbazb00 11y agoMakes me glad that I accidentally put my RFID-enabled passport in the microwave, typed in 1 second and hit start.
- acyacy 11y agoIt must fun be waiting in the non-RFID queue at immigration.
- kalleboo 11y agoWas the State Department still running the whole Oracle database cluster on a single hardware node since last year's issues? http://fcw.com/Articles/2014/10/20/State-Department-database-crash-1.aspx?Page=all&p=1 http://fcw.com/Articles/2014/10/20/State-Department-database...
- needusername 11y ago10g on Windows 2003, can't make this shit up.
- acyacy 11y agoIt is natural for issues for happen like this time to time. If it's not technology, something else. Australia's visa offices (DIBP) are on industrial action at the moment.
- jpatokal 11y agoSo, what's the last time a Fortune 500 company's IT systems failed so hard they couldn't do anything for two weeks?
- acyacy 11y agoOn a technical level, it's possible, on a practical level it's not. You can't get 100% uptime due to the unforeseen problems that will hit once in a while. If the downtime was anticipated it can always be averted. Even a Fortune 500 can expect some downtime over a period large enough. Take Sony earlier this year. The US government itself the year before.
- mikhailfranco 11y agoFBI site for background checks also has implementation issues: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/identity-history-summary-checks http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/identity-history-summary-ch... So they can record all our conversations in real-time, but it takes 3-4 months to do a simple query of criminal records.
- Shank 11y agoDifferent departments. The NSA and FBI don't talk to each other; NSA has all of the technological innovations for monitoring wide spreads of internet bandwidth.
- us0r 11y ago"The NSA and FBI don't talk to each other" You clearly have not read any of the Snowden docs. http://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm http://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoYou're both wrong, in a way. They interact, but that doesn't mean they are cohesive in utilizing each other's technologies/competencies.
- us0r 11y agohttp://cryptome.org/2015/06/cyber-spy-nyt-15-0604.pdf http://cryptome.org/2015/06/cyber-spy-nyt-15-0604.pdf
- codecamper 11y agoWe always knew that the FBI surveillance project was an complete and utter waste of money designed simply to make it appear that the government is indeed doing something.
- malkia 11y agoOn 18 June 2015 the Lufthansa site looked like this %templateSomethingVar/somethingVar1% and lots of variables like that (not sure what template system were they using). Now it's okay. But Polish airlines is down too (unrelated systems I guess)... but could this be something coordinated? Ah... probably not :)
- saryant 11y agoLufty's site has always had bugs like that.
- jpatokal 11y agoApparently last year's major failure was caused by their Oracle data warehouse going down hard: http://foia.state.gov/_docs/PIA/ConsularConsolidatedDatabase_CCD.pdf http://foia.state.gov/_docs/PIA/ConsularConsolidatedDatabase... "The Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) is one of the largest Oracle based data warehouses in the world that holds current and archived data from the Consular Affairs (CA) domestic and post databases around the world. As of December 2009, it contains over 100 million visa cases and 75 million photographs, utilizing billions of rows of data, and has a current growth rate of approximately 35 thousand visa cases every day" Unclear what's gone wrong this time, but the mention of "biometrics" (like photographs) makes me suspect it's the same system.
- jpatokal 11y agoAn interview with the director responsible for the system, props to @kalleboo for finding this: http://fcw.com/Articles/2014/10/20/State-Department-database-crash-1.aspx?Page=all&p=1 http://fcw.com/Articles/2014/10/20/State-Department-database... Typical quote: "We knew we could run it on one node. We needed to have one very powerful node."
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> Typical quote: "We knew we could run it on one node. We needed to have one very powerful node." As someone who has done government contracting...it's always alarming when this path is suggested. The last time was a beefy server with about 50TB of ram to keep all data in memory with multiple hard drives to keep backups. Ugh.
- codecamper 11y agoThe WOPR? How about a nice game of chess?
- crdb 11y agoMind talking more about what the challenges in running a 50TB relational database? I and I'm sure many others would be very interested in a blog post or long-ish comment with anecdotes and lessons learnt...
- Larrikin 11y agoI've been trying to get marriage visa things completed since May. http://nvc.state.gov/ http://nvc.state.gov/ The payment system was down for almost the entire month of May. After finally being able to get through step 2, I've been stopped constantly. The entire social security website was down one night this month. I currently need my tax transcripts from the IRS. The online system for printing them out is down indefinitely and even the form to request they be sent by mail was constantly throwing up a technical error has occurred message.
- shepbook 11y agoI know that pain. Took me and my wife almost 5 years, near $2,000 and three interviews to get her green card. And that was with her already being in the states when we met and got married. Keep at it. The feeling when it's finally over is great.
- kalleboo 11y agoThese stories always fascinate me. At that point why even bother validating the grounds for the visa - anyone who would put up with a process like that deserves it! I immigrated to Japan - a country often held up as an example of xenophobia and resistance to immigration, and it only took a week for my spouse visa paperwork to be examined and approved. The only cost was for translations of some paperwork from home ($40 at the embassy) and then $20 for the residence card once I was approved.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- artmageddon 11y agoMy wife and I are trying to do the same thing, we're very close to applying for Adjustment of Status(for her), and are scrambling to make sure we don't miss any nitty-gritty details, which is proving to be quite the headache. Can you elaborate on why it took it as long as it did?
- narrator 11y agoWhat's funny is they used to do this stuff with much much slower computer systems back in the 70s and 80s.
- rodgerd 11y agoThat was before it became a political imperative to drown the government in a bathtub.
- Nano2rad 11y agoGovernment holding biometric data is unsafe for citizens. There will always be problems, security of data and security of citizens.
- klipt 11y agoEvery visitor to the US is fingerprinted these days.
- fleitz 11y agoWhen did they start doing this? I arrived two weeks ago, no finger print required.
- mahyarm 11y agohttp://www.immihelp.com/visas/usvisit.html http://www.immihelp.com/visas/usvisit.html If your canadian, probably not.
- liquidmetal 11y agoThey probably already have you fingerprints.
- mahyarm 11y agoNo they do not. I've never been fingerprinted as a Canadian until I got a work visa for the USA. For many Canadians who visit the usa for tourism or similar will never have their fingerprints in a canadian or us database under current laws.
- nly 11y agoAnd photographed
- mfenniak 11y agoExcept Canadians. Unless they're NEXUS pass holding Canadians, in which case they have been fingerprinted. I just got fingerprinted this weekend for a NEXUS pass; my fingerprints are apparently "perfect". The US CBP agent taking them advised me not to take up a life of crime, as I would be caught very quickly. Or at least to wear gloves.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- guard-of-terra 11y agoOn slightly related note, USA doesn't support airport transfers without visa - which is taken for granted in the rest of the world. Which basically makes Latin America an island since most flights there are routed via USA, its gatekeeper.
- zuma 11y agoJust to add to the conspiracy theory, wonder whether this is related: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/08/us-g7-summit-obama-cyberattack-idUSKBN0OO1RA20150608 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/08/us-g7-summit-obama...
- DyslexicAtheist 11y ago> There is no evidence the problem is cyber-security related. have they fixed their data-leak into archive.org yet? (LOL) http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/20/misconfiguration-of-state-gov-website-exposes-pdf-files/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/20/misconfigurat...
- friism 11y agoI'm glad that they're at least prioritizing H2A agricultural workers.
- anindha 11y agoUS visa processing is back online (same link). "The Bureau of Consular Affairs reports that the database responsible for handling biometric clearances has been rebuilt and is being tested. 39 posts, representing more than two-thirds of our normal capacity, are now online and issuing visas. We are working to restore full biometric data processing."