Part of the Social Security website (ssa.gov) only works during certain hours
.. its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
.. its a website run by the US Government. Why does it have such large downtimes in this day and age?
We know why but pointing out how Republicans only policy position is "explicitly kneecap everything so we can privatize it and funnel money to our friends at non negotiated rates 5x the normal end user retail cost" is apparently not allowed because some guys like guys and some people want to alter a pronoun by one letter or some such shit.
at this point i don't even think its that deep anymore sometimes. Sure they do things like that. But at this point...sometimes they really are just fucking cartoon villains. Being evil just because.
That's how I feel gesturing broadly at the 3 or 4 states they're still actively fighting against minimum marriage age laws.
Their voters out here voting for them to "protect children" from pronouns, from books, from learning - then turn a blind eye when they vote to make marrying at 12 legal again or to force 12 year olds to give birth or to send 12 year olds back to the mines. Not only are the politicians cartoon villains, in 2023 so are their voters. Full Stop.
The answer is much less exciting. It's mainframes.
Plenty of systems operate just fine without 4-6 hours of daily scheduled downtime. This is just deliberate.
Wow this I don’t understand at all.
translation: "It's impossible to have a conversation about the GOP "Starve the beast" policy because the conversation will be derailed by "LGBT people exist, something something woke ideology""
Here have my Lemmy gold 🏆
This is sublime
I’m going to have a guess and suggest that the website is probably integrated with some much older mainframe system and a batch process or several batch processes run daily overnight to shuttle data between the two systems to keep them updated and in sync.
Syncing the two sets of data while the database is live and changing is a pain the the bum, so they freeze it while the data transfers are taking place.
This is the real answer. Main frame batch processing.
And till you haven’t experienced it, it seems like an excuse. Why can’t you simply do it all the time. Why can’t you get rid of the mainframe, etc.
But if only it were that easy. There is a reason IBM can still acquire multi billion dollar companies and then run them into the ground.
My company has maybe a couple million customers and can’t get rid of its mainframe and in areas that it’s gotten the process away from the mainframe, batch patronizing is still a thing. Because that is the only way to guarantee integrity.
So yea. I wish your comment gets more up votes. Because it is not a conspiracy, it is a technical limitation.
I like working with legacy systems. Post something, go fart around on your phone for fifteen minutes while you wait for it to post.
I had to do some legacy app modernization for one of the largest telecoms companies in the US, and their mainframe system and the UI, while ugly, performed so much faster than the modern approach.
Given, we weren't the most talented team out there, but rendering the UI on the server side was unmatched in performance versus what we could get out of a web browser. I was the UI guy so I didn't really touch mainframe side, but it was wild to me that they made this system like 30 years ago and it worked so much better than our modern implementation
I'm not sure whether I want to work with your team or not, considering all fifteen of those minutes farting I get to bill to the client
lol i was more or less just remarking on the fact that yes mainframe and other legacy apps are pretty old, however that does not mean that they're necessarily worse than a modern implementation
Its the conspiracy of capitalism. If nothing else this is another example of how megacorps have more say in government operations that the entire population.
It can be, but it's also an issue of "move fast and break things" doesn't work in all environments.
You don't want your bank to have an oops with your checking account, or your medical records to get messed up because someone didn't code it well enough. If it works and is stable, there needs to be a demonstrable benefit and a guarantee that it will keep working when moving to a newer system. Usually on a budget of "what do you mean you need a budget, just do it".
This also explains, very basically, why financial systems are the way they are. The backend is ancient but they know how it works so it stays the same and we see it’s weird quirks all the time.
More like, they know of they try to change, and their is an issue and people's statements payments are at risk, it's their ass.
Oh it’s hugely risky. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to change it. But most people don’t know it’s all held together with duck tape and bubblegum.
I particularly enjoy the "if you need immediate assistance" note for a telephone line that's open even fewer hours than the website. it's positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn't. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who's it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it's open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less "immediate" than the site that's closed.
I think it's less "this line is for emergencies" and more "our online process could takes days to get a response, here's a line to a real human".
Well damn, that web server has a good union.
The hours unavailable:
The first one sounds like "scheduled maintenance" gone awry. Like for something that takes 5 minutes to run that you tell your boss will take an hour, who tells his boss it'll take two hours, boss then says "let's double that to be safe".
I wanna know WHY it is unavailable. Does the system crash if there's not enough paper in the dot-matrix printer? Are the HTTP responses being filled out manually in real time?
We have the same for the tax system in Sweden. The reason there is multi part but two big ones are:
Guarantees around how long time processing your tax information will take. But this gets harder if your information comes in at off hours since the tax information still needs a human stamp of approval (which really is making sure the system didn't flag it as manual review which happens at random and if there are discrepancies)
The second, related one, is that they do batch processing at night and while they could queue data for the next day doing so would require a rewrite of the law guaranteeing a certain processing time, since if your data comes in after the start of the batch run it won't run until the next day, which would be hard to properly inform people about in a way they'll accept. Better then to simply not accept it then.
It's like saying "This law ensures your application will be processed in 48hrs" then everyone rejoice and vote! But instead of adding more manpower to process they limit the application coming in. Sneaky.
While I get your point I don't really agree. This law/requirement on the tax agency predates digital tax forms and is the same if you send in on paper. It's more about how they don't want to make things more complicated by having different rules for different media. It's still so much more simple to use the digital forms / system and very few people actually need these systems online during the night and even fewer companies. The benefit is simply far outweighed by the cost. Remember it would be tax payers that have to pay for the system being available 24/7 with everything that entails in increased support costs and infrastructure costs due to the higher SLA levels required from all parties involved.
Most government sites from NY also keep business hours
I asked my family's lawyer about it and he said that the time open and closed is a law. So they have to "close down" certain sites at certain times to comply with those laws
Great, so some governments operate like a fridge in Sabbath Mode
What exactly does Sabbath mode do? Is it like a burst of deep freeze so the appliance can power down Fri-Sat and stay cold, or what?
Asking as a renter with Sabbath mode on the fridge in my apartment.
Orthodox Jews aren't allowed to interact with certain things on the Sabbath, so the temperature display is turned off and other stuff is automated so no adjustments can be made on that day.
That's stupid.
You should only pay taxes for purchases/income during their business hours then.
I've seen websites of local stores in the bible belt that weren't reachable on sundays, but a government site not working at certain times is just weird and backwards.
One might say that this website has some of the best union behind it, perharps on the entire planet.
Well, you see now, if you reverse the letters in the website address it spells exactly why it has issues.
Cause it has a lot of SAS?
Maybe they need to send you your http request manually
...aand, we're back to Web 0.0.
By the way, is this how most sites are going to work in Metaverse?
It's probably going to feel more like Watson in that Sherlock Holmes videogame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13YlEPwOfmk
Probs yeah. Though you'll see it in VR!
...so it would be stupid if this works, but it's a stupid problem in the first place, so try changing the time on your computer to be within their operational hours.
I recall cheesing videogames with that back in the day, and the UI of a halfway decent videogame would put most govt web design to shame. Worth a shot?
That's not going to work on a website with restrictions like this. The restriction is set on the web server, not on the client. Limiting client access by what time it is where THEY are is not a thing.
On one hand, this seems unlikely to work because it's easier to check the server's clock for the time. On the other, it'd be a mistake to expect the government to take the straightforward option when there's a perfectly good ass-backwards way to screw it up.
^this guy govts
The NC unemployment was website goes offline for maintenance every night. It's so needlessly complicated on purpose.
There is a reason and not what you think.
Look here: https://kbin.social/m/mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world/t/162927/-/comment/639904
I can't see the comments you linked, but do see the other comments regarding data shuffle. My point still stands. Needlessly complicated. This could be updated if the state managed itself properly.
You didn't miss anything, everybody is giving them a pass because they have an old mainframe and until you've had to sync one you just don't know. We all know the reason the government is still using mainframes from the 70s. You mean to tell me there's no company that's ever migrated away from a mainframe? It's always a budget issue. And in the US anything that isn't military spending is a budget issue.
Your point is incorrect. It is not needlessly complicated. It has to do with mainframe batch processing times.
It’s not a conspiracy, it is a technical challenge that is not easy to some. It is complicated, but not needlessly. If it was easy, it would have been fixed.
I am sure there are a number of private companies that do the same but simply don’t tell you.
E.g., every bank has a cut off time for transfers, same reason.
Okay - fair. Good points. I yield. Thank you for the info - truly.
In Finland you can access your info and do online forms any time of the day. The information gets updated when it gets and the site has the newest version available at the time. When they do maintenance, they inform it couple of days before on the website.
In my experience, it frequently doesn't work within posted hours either
cries in SSI
Assuming this isn’t a chat functionality that requires humans to function, maybe it goes down for maintenance over that outage period. If so, it’s terribly designed.
Could be too limit the number of requests that ultimately ended up needing to be processed by a "real human". Knowing government that was human might be literally some person in the back transcribing the digital requests to paper so that some technophobe boss can review or file it....
That would funnel all the requests to the same 8hs at day, instead of letting them distribute on the entire of the day.
Wdym taxes aren't going where they benefit people?
$40b in taxpayer money is being dropped on Ukrainian territory right now which will eventually put Ukraine in such a weak position that it won't be able to prevent the flood of American/European countries coming in to take over all their industry. This will trickle down, no? /s
I for one am ready for a public servant AI that gives you form Y34-b and sends you to another AI that then tells you it should've been form Y34-a and only the third AI can fix it but they're currently on vacation so you'll have to comeback another time on a Monday or Wednesday between 10:00 and 10:30am.
In case you were unaware, the US government sucks at everything but killing people, and sometimes they take 20yr to do that. They just flat out suck, there's your "why."
the university I attended freshman year was ranked top 10 in the US for comp sci (at least as of 4 years ago), yet some of their account management stuff on their website wouldn't be accessible after like 7pm. absolutely insane
Massive frame batch processing is the usual reason.
And before it ask why not replace it, the short answer outs it is complicated.
It might be a question better speed in eli5.
Having worked for social security for 5 years, and now 20 years in IT, I'm totally not surprised. No idea what part of this website is, but you can either afford redundancies or downtown.
Come on. If you actually worked for social security you have to know why. It’s is related to mainframe batch processing.
But I can see why you might say what it did. Maybe you think it seems cooler to simply dump on the government it meant your 20 years of experience is 1 year repeated 290 times. So really 1 year of experience but you just got older.
it says try in Easter time, you have a lot to wait
common government L
Maybe it is easier to negate attacks if they only have the system available during working hours?